Compression And Archiving

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• [lzlib/lgzip] (5.1) - read/write gzip files. Interface based on Lua io library. Uses zlib [1]. (Tiago Dionizio)
• [lua-zlib] (5.1) - Simple streaming interface to zlib.
• [LuaZip] (5.0/5.1) - lightweight library to read files stored in zip files. Uses zziplib [2]. (Danilo Tuler)
• [lua-zip] (5.1) - Read and write zip files. Uses [libzip].
• [lua-bz2] (5.1) - read bzip2 files. Uses libbzip2. (ThomasHarningJr)
• [LibArchive] (5.1) - Lua binding to libarchive [3], supporting a variety of archiving and compression formas (Brian Maher)
• [LArc] (5.1) - read/write various compressed formats (gzip/bzip2/xv/zip/zip64/tar). Uses zlib/libbzip2/liblzma for core compress/decompress routines in C and higher-level functions in Lua. (Tom Harris)
• ModuleCompressDeflateLua (5.1) - implementation of DEFLATE (e.g. gzip/zlib) in pure Lua (decompress only). (DavidManura)
• [LibCompress] (5.1) - LZW and Huffman compression/decompression in pure Lua. Can automatically choose the most efficient algorithm for specific data.
• LuaRocks has pure Lua implementations of tar and zip (using lzlib).
• os.execute or io.popen may be used to execute a command directly (e.g. os.execute("unzip foo.zip")). LuaRocks and LuaDist make use of this.

For compression by removing whitespace or comments, the following utilities are available:

• [lstrip] (5.1) - A tool for compressing Lua programs by removing comments and whitespace.
• [LuaSrcDiet] (5.1) - Similar to lstrip, but also able to rename local variables.
• [squish] - Compress and archive Lua code+files [4]. Based on LuaSrcDiet. Optionally uses ModuleCompressDeflateLua.

Main qualitative characteristics of these libraries include

• Which formats are supported?
• Are read and/or write modes supported? any other limitations?
• What is the core implementation? binding to C library or pure Lua implementation?

Other programming languages cross reference:

• [Python]
• Wikipedia: [Data compression] [File archiver]