Javascript: convert a string to a shorter 6-bit binary representation?

Asked Nov 17 '13 at 02:05

Active Nov 17 '13 at 02:05

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In Javascript I have a large dictionary consisting only of strings with the letters a to z, A to Z en 0-9. Because these are 62 characters, each character would only need 6 bits.

I read somewhere that Javascript uses at least 2 bytes per character, so I thought I could save a lot of memory/diskspace by compressing the whole dictionary into a smaller representation, maybe binary or integer.

Could this be done? I guess I need 2 functions, to convert the strings and vice versa.

Any ideas?

asked Nov 17 '13 at 02:05

Dylan

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I doubt that it's really necessary - just _how_ big is your object? – Qantas 94 Heavy Nov 17 '13 at 02:07
the dictionary is about 400.000 words, about 2 MB uncompressed. I need this to fit into an app, so the smaller, the better... – Dylan Nov 17 '13 at 02:09
Have you thought of serialising the object, converting it to base64 then decoding it in your code? – Qantas 94 Heavy Nov 17 '13 at 02:13
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I would try the LZW compression of the strings from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/294297/javascript-implementation-of-gzip – dave Nov 17 '13 at 02:25
deflate works well on text. you can get deflate and inflate for js as part of jszip... – dandavis Nov 17 '13 at 02:37

Javascript: convert a string to a shorter 6-bit binary representation?

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