Traditional ZIP file compressors are too easy to use, and rob the user of the vital character-building experience that comes with using poorly made software. For the more Sisyphean users looking for an uphill battle, this project is for you.
This project is a ZIP file compressor that is difficult to use, limited in scope, but easy to understand (only ~300 LOC!).
zlib is not used, and the zipfile library is only used to check that the resulting ZIP file can be correctly decompressed. It implements
LZ77 compression, transforms it into a DEFLATE bitstream and then wraps it in the correct ZIP file headers.
The ZIP file format is relatively complex, but I made a few executive decisions to make my life easier:
- Only DEFLATE compression is supported (I don't like the acronyms of the other compression methods. Sorry.)
- The DEFLATE compression uses fixed Huffman coding to encode the tokens (dynamic Huffman trees are too much work)
- The ZIP files created only have a singular file and no directory structure (multiple files == "bloat")
Because I can.
Not recommended. However, if you insist:
strk = """
"Did you win your sword fight?"
"Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world."
"And you wrote the software."
"Yeah. That, too," Hiro says."
"""
string_to_zip("sample.txt", strk)