How to compress or compact a string in Python

Question

I\'m making a python \"script\" that sends a string to a webservice (in C#). I NEED to compress or compact this string, because the bandwidth and MBs data is LIMITED (yeah, in c

Answer 1

How about zlib?

import zlib

a = "this string needs compressing"
a = zlib.compress(a)
print zlib.decompress(a) #outputs original contents of a

You can also use sys.getsizeof(obj) to see how much data an object takes up before and after compression.