in reply to Re^2: How good is gzip data as digest?
in thread How good is gzip data as digest?
If you're currently using an ASCII version of an MD5 digest, you could easily compress 1/3 of the space out by converting it to binary and then using BASE64 to convert to a string. (Or, even better, do it directly.) The ASCII version uses a byte to hold 4 bits of information, while BASE64 will store 6 bits of info in a byte. If you don't mind using a binary string, that would let you compress to 50% of the original size.
Other than that, I wouldn't expect much. Compression routines (at least the ones I'm familiar with) simply squash repetitive patterns out of the data. A digest tends to spread values evenly through the result space, so there shouldn't be much repetition for a compression algorithm to take advantage of.
...roboticus
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