200 – One-shot data compression

200 – One-shot data compression#

The module compression, new in Python 3.14, provides a convenient way to do one-shot data compression. There are 5 different algorithms to choose from, but you can default to the Zstd if you don’t have any particular reason to pick one over another.

To compress data, make sure you’re working with bytes and call the function compress:

from compression import zstd

data = ("Hello, world!" * 1000).encode()

compressed = zstd.compress(data)

You can see this compresses the data to only occupy \(0.2\%\) of its original size:

print(len(compressed))  # 31
print(len(compressed) / len(data))  # 0.0023846153846153848

You can decompress the data with the aptly-named function decompress:

print(zstd.decompress(compressed) == data) # True