compact files

[fabiopesaju]

hello...

please, about compaction, which component can you suggest me? (for pure text files)

[Bart]

Zip?
Fc has libs for it.

Bart

[lucamar]

Customary links:

• paszlib
• FreePascalArchivePackage
• bzip2lib
• ZLib

Have fun!

[wp]

Sample code here: http://forum.lazarus-ide.org/index.php/topic,39634.msg272704.html#msg272704

[User137]

I always considered the stream approach best:
https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/fcl/zstream/index.html

Some code example:
https://github.com/Zaflis/nxpascal/blob/master/src/nxData.pas

The principle of the class was to keep a whole gameworld loaded in memory at the time. But only the active areas are decompressed. I have tested that working on a realtime game, compressing and decompressing tile chunks with threading as camera moves rapidly. It actually was far smoother with threads, the app doesn't lock up waiting for the compression. Even a few milliseconds may be noticeable.

You can compress/decompress a TStringList when using:
https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/classes/tstrings.loadfromstream.html
But you might need TMemoryStream and/or TFileStream in the process. But it's far better than needing to save uncompressed file to disk, and then load it back in for zipping and resaving. Depends on what you intended to do...