Compressing and uncompressing a string with PHP

Today I went on a mission to find a PHP function that I’ve never used before and knew nothing about. The mission was such a success that I have two functions to discuss and honestly, I’m pretty sure I’ll never use them. That being said, if the need ever arises where you need to compress a string (perhaps as a way to save space or bandwidth) you can use gzcompress and gzuncompress when you need to uncompress the string (obviously ;)

Let’s start by compressing our string:

$compressed = gzcompress('Such uncompressed, much length');

And to uncompress:

$uncompressed = gzuncompress($compressed);

You can optionally pass in a compression level as the 2nd parameter, the default is 6 as well as an encoding value which defaults to ZLIB_ENCODING_DEFLATE.

If you’ve ever used these functions I’d love to hear about it, comment below!