What's the best way to compress a scalar?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: What's the best way to compress a scalar? by johngg (Canon) on Feb 16, 2007 at 23:51 UTC
Other possibilities are Compress::Zlib and it's OO wrapper IO::Zlib or, for better but slower compression, Compress::Bzip2. Cheers, JohnGG	[reply]
Re^2: What's the best way to compress a scalar? by Burak (Chaplain) on Feb 17, 2007 at 14:39 UTC
Zlib will be in perl' s CORE with the next stable release: `C:\>corelist -a Compress::Zlib Compress::Zlib was first released with perl 5.009003 5.009003 2.000_07 5.009004 2.000_13` [download] Also ActiveState is bundling it with ActivePerl for years and I think that it is and will be better supported than any other Compres::* module :)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: What's the best way to compress a scalar? by friedo (Prior) on Feb 16, 2007 at 22:34 UTC
I'm a fan of Compress::LZF which is pretty fast and very easy to use.	[reply]
Re: What's the best way to compress a scalar? by zentara (Cardinal) on Feb 17, 2007 at 13:12 UTC
Another possibilty is to run some compression on it before freezing it. `#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Math::BaseCnv; #fast my $time = time; print "time -> $time\n"; my $time_128 = cnv( $time, 10, 128 ); print "time_128 -> $time_128\n"; #this will sometimes print hidden newlines exit;` [download] OUTPUT: `time -> 1171717768 time_128 -> 4k#8` [download] I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: What's the best way to compress a scalar? by andye (Curate) on Feb 20, 2007 at 12:22 UTC
I'm using Compress::LZF on PDLs which I've frozen with Storable, and it's working well.	[reply]