ZLIB Decompression - Client Side

Rajeev Raina picture Rajeev Raina · Dec 22, 2010 · Viewed 42.1k times · Source

I am receiving data as an "ZLIB" compressed inputstream.

Using Javascript/Ajax/JQuery, I need to uncompress it on the client side.

Is there a way to do so? Please help.

I already have this working in JAVA as below, but need to do this on Client Side.

url = new URL(getCodeBase(), dataSrcfile); 
URLConnection urlConn = url.openConnection();
urlConn.setUseCaches(false); 
InputStream in = urlConn.getInputStream();
InflaterInputStream inflate = new InflaterInputStream(in);
InputStreamReader inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(inflate);
InputStreamReader inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(in);
BufferedReader bufReader = new BufferedReader(inputStreamReader);
// Read until no more '#'
int i = 0;
int nHidden = 0;
String line1;
do //------------------------Parsing Starts Here
{
    line1 = bufReader.readLine();
.............
...... so on

Answer

Redsandro picture Redsandro · Mar 27, 2014

Pako is a full and modern Zlib port.

Here is a very simple example and you can work from there.

Get pako.js and you can decompress byteArray like so:

<html>
<head>
  <title>Gunzipping binary gzipped string</title>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="pako.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">

    // Get datastream as Array, for example:
    var charData    = [31,139,8,0,0,0,0,0,0,3,5,193,219,13,0,16,16,4,192,86,214,151,102,52,33,110,35,66,108,226,60,218,55,147,164,238,24,173,19,143,241,18,85,27,58,203,57,46,29,25,198,34,163,193,247,106,179,134,15,50,167,173,148,48,0,0,0];

    // Turn number array into byte-array
    var binData     = new Uint8Array(charData);

    // Pako magic
    var data        = pako.inflate(binData);

    // Convert gunzipped byteArray back to ascii string:
    var strData     = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, new Uint16Array(data));

    // Output to console
    console.log(strData);

  </script>
</head>
<body>
    Open up the developer console.
</body>
</html>

Running example: http://jsfiddle.net/9yH7M/

Alternatively you can base64 encode the array before you send it over as the Array takes up a lot of overhead when sending as JSON or XML. Decode likewise:

// Get some base64 encoded binary data from the server. Imagine we got this:
var b64Data     = 'H4sIAAAAAAAAAwXB2w0AEBAEwFbWl2Y0IW4jQmziPNo3k6TuGK0Tj/ESVRs6yzkuHRnGIqPB92qzhg8yp62UMAAAAA==';

// Decode base64 (convert ascii to binary)
var strData     = atob(b64Data);

// Convert binary string to character-number array
var charData    = strData.split('').map(function(x){return x.charCodeAt(0);});

// Turn number array into byte-array
var binData     = new Uint8Array(charData);

// Pako magic
var data        = pako.inflate(binData);

// Convert gunzipped byteArray back to ascii string:
var strData     = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, new Uint16Array(data));

// Output to console
console.log(strData);

Running example: http://jsfiddle.net/9yH7M/1/

To go more advanced, here is the pako API documentation.