lz-utils - Utils for string compression

Features

• Zero runtime dependencies
• Multiple compression strategies for different environments
• ESM and CommonJS support
• TypeScript type definitions included
• Browser bundle (IIFE) included

API

Method	Platform	Sync/Async	Algorithm	Minified
deflateSync(str)	Node.js	Sync	Native zlib	0.13 KB
deflate(str)	Node.js	Async	Native zlib	0.17 KB
inflateSync(str)	Browser	Sync	tiny-inflate	3.15 KB
inflate(str)	Browser	Async (Worker)	tiny-inflate	3.60 KB
compress(str)	Both	Sync	lz-string	1.71 KB
decompress(str)	Both	Sync	lz-string	1.59 KB
createScriptLoader(str)	Node.js	Sync	zlib + loader template	4.03 KB

• deflateSync / deflate - Compress raw string and encode in base64 (Node.js only, highest performance)
• inflateSync / inflate - Decompress base64 string to raw string (Browser only, inflate uses Web Worker for multi-thread decompression)
• compress / decompress - LZ-string based compression/decompression in base64 (works on both browser and Node.js)
• createScriptLoader - Create a self-contained HTML script that decompresses and executes the given string in browser

Install

npm install lz-utils

Usage

Node.js - Compress with deflate (recommended)

const { deflateSync, deflate } = require('lz-utils');

const raw = "this is string";

// Synchronous
const compressed = deflateSync(raw);

// Asynchronous
const compressed = await deflate(raw);

Browser - Decompress with inflate

import { inflateSync, inflate } from 'lz-utils/inflate-sync';
// or
import { inflate } from 'lz-utils/inflate';

// Synchronous
const raw = inflateSync(compressed);

// Asynchronous (Web Worker)
const raw = await inflate(compressed);

Cross-platform - LZ-string compress/decompress

import { compress, decompress } from 'lz-utils';

const raw = "this is string";
const compressed = compress(raw);
const decompressed = decompress(compressed);

Create script loader

const { createScriptLoader } = require('lz-utils');

// Creates a self-contained HTML script that will decompress and execute in browser
const script = createScriptLoader('console.log("hello")');

Subpath imports

Each function can be imported individually to minimize bundle size:

import compress from 'lz-utils/compress';
import decompress from 'lz-utils/decompress';
import deflate from 'lz-utils/deflate';
import deflateSync from 'lz-utils/deflate-sync';
import inflate from 'lz-utils/inflate';
import inflateSync from 'lz-utils/inflate-sync';
import createScriptLoader from 'lz-utils/create-script-loader';

Examples

• test.js - Node.js test
• test.html - Browser test

Why lz-utils?

lz-utils is designed for a specific workflow: generating self-contained HTML reports.

• Goal - Generate HTML reports that are as fast to produce as possible and as small in file size as possible.
• How it works - Report data is compressed on the server (Node.js) and bundled into a single HTML file. When the user opens the file in the browser, the data is self-decompressed and rendered on the fly. This is why deflate runs on Node.js and inflate runs in the browser.
• Why base64? - The compressed output is binary data, which cannot be safely embedded in JavaScript (due to encoding and CORS issues). Converting it to base64 produces a plain JS string that can be reliably stored in JSON and embedded in HTML without any escaping problems.

String Compression Benchmark

• string-compression - lz-string, pako, uzip.js, fflate, tiny-inflate

Links

• pieroxy/lz-string - LZ-based compression algorithm
• foliojs/tiny-inflate - Tiny DEFLATE decompression library

Changelog