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 Entire forum ➜ MUSHclient ➜ Lua ➜ Compression and decompression

Compression and decompression

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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,120 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Thu 09 Dec 2004 03:25 AM (UTC)
Message
Introduction

Lua strings have the useful attribute that they can contain any character, including the 'null' character (hex 00) which is often used in C to delimit strings.

With this in mind, version 3.57 of MUSHclient offers compression and decompression for Lua scripting. This is based on the zLib library which is already incorporated into MUSHclient for use in MCCP decompression.

Compress


utils.compress (s [, method] )


Compresses string s and returns the compressed form. Note that it may contain nulls (bytes with a zero value).

The optional argument 'method' indicates the level of compression you want.


  • 0 = no compression
  • 1 = best speed
    ....
  • 9 = best compression


The default, if omitted, is 6.

Decompression


utils.decompress (s)


Decompresses string s and returns the decompressed form. Raises an error if decompression cannot be done (eg. bad compressed data).

These two functions should be complementary, so that this should always be true:


x = "some string" -- for any (string) data whatsoever

y = utils.decompress (utils.compress (x)) --> y should be same as x


- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Poromenos   Greece  (1,037 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #1 on Thu 09 Dec 2004 10:54 PM (UTC)
Message
I think all the languages allow nulls. I know VB does.

Vidi, Vici, Veni.
http://porocrom.poromenos.org/ Read it!
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,120 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #2 on Fri 10 Dec 2004 12:52 AM (UTC)
Message
It's the way that data is passed into MUSHclient that is the problem. Here is the code for Base64Encode, for example:


VARIANT CMUSHclientDoc::Base64Encode(LPCTSTR Text, BOOL MultiLine) 
{
int len = strlen (Text);

...

}


The first thing it does is find the length of the supplied text by doing strlen, which searches for a null. That terminates the string.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Flannel   USA  (1,230 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #3 on Fri 10 Dec 2004 01:04 AM (UTC)
Message
Thats passing back into MC from... what? the lua dll? is that before or after compression? (passed into MC proper? or passed into MC's zlib?)

So does Lua use PWSZ strings? or still BSTRs?

and shouldnt the workaround be easy enough?

~Flannel

Messiah of Rose
Eternity's Trials.

Clones are people two.
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,120 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #4 on Fri 10 Dec 2004 01:26 AM (UTC)
Message
That's the code generated when I do a COM interface, in this case from a script language, other than Lua, into MUSHclient. The LPCTSTR data type is a long pointer to a C-string. A C-string is a null-terminated one.

However with Lua the scripting interface is different, it does not rely on COM. Thus, if I expect nulls in strings, which I do for something like a hash, encryption or (de)compression, then I ask Lua for a string, and a length, as 2 separate fields. That way imbedded nulls don't affect the result.


- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Poromenos   Greece  (1,037 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #5 on Fri 10 Dec 2004 07:30 AM (UTC)
Message
Hmm, I don't remember much about C++ strings, but I think that the STL and MFC string types allow nulls in them. I don't know if you could change all the declarations to that type though.

Vidi, Vici, Veni.
http://porocrom.poromenos.org/ Read it!
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