How to compress a String in Java?

Question

I use GZIPOutputStream or ZIPOutputStream to compress a String (my string.length() is less than 20), but the compressed result is longer than the original string.

On some site, I found some friends said that this is because my original string is too short, GZIPOutputStream can be used to compress longer strings.

so, can somebody give me a help to compress a String?

My function is like:

String compress(String original) throws Exception {

}

Update:

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.zip.GZIPOutputStream;
import java.util.zip.*;


//ZipUtil 
public class ZipUtil {
    public static String compress(String str) {
        if (str == null || str.length() == 0) {
            return str;
        }

        ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        GZIPOutputStream gzip = new GZIPOutputStream(out);
        gzip.write(str.getBytes());
        gzip.close();
        return out.toString("ISO-8859-1");
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        String string = "admin";
        System.out.println("after compress:");
        System.out.println(ZipUtil.compress(string));
    }
}

The result is :

Answer 1

Compression algorithms almost always have some form of space overhead, which means that they are only effective when compressing data which is sufficiently large that the overhead is smaller than the amount of saved space.

Compressing a string which is only 20 characters long is not too easy, and it is not always possible. If you have repetition, Huffman Coding or simple run-length encoding might be able to compress, but probably not by very much.