b64pack

B64pack compresses short text messages using simple character encoding followed by a base64 decoding pass. It was originally written to help squeeze more than 160 characters into a single SMS message. Depending on the content, text messages up to 213 characters long can be compressed to fit into the 160-character limit.

For messages shorter than 213 characters, b64pack will usually give you better compression than compress, gzip, bzip2 or xz. It is also faster and less resource-hungry than any of these programs (even in its present non-optimized form). This makes it suitable for processing of short messages, such as SMSs, tweets and instant messages.

Documentation

The method used by b64pack is described in detail in the following paper:

Kenan Kalajdzic, Samaher Hussein Ali and Ahmed Patel. Rapid Lossless Compression of Short Text Messages. Computer Standards & Interfaces, Elsevier, January 2015.

The program itself is too simple to require any elaborate documentation. A simple man page provided in the doc directory should be sufficiently informative. To view the man page without installing it, type:

$ nroff -man doc/b64pack.1 | less -r

Building and Installing

B64pack doesn't depend on any libraries besides libc, so you should be able to build it on any UNIX system by typing:

$ make

This will generate the executable named b64pack in the src directory and a gzipped version of the man page in the doc directory.

For installing, type as root:

# make install

You may have to adjust the installation directories for the b64pack command and the corresponding man page in src/Makefile and doc/Makefile, respectivelly.

Running

If executed without any options b64pack reads a text message from stdin and writes the compressed message to stdout.

If the option -d is specified, b64pack runs in the decompression mode, reading a compressed message from stdin and writing the decompressed message to stdout. Note that the decompressed message may contain trailing spaces, which are used for padding during compression.

License

Copyright © 2015 Kenan Kalajdzic.

Licensed under GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later.