(Un/De)compress a string in bash?

Question

Is it possible to compress/decompress a string in bash using stdin/stdout ?

I tried this but apparently it is not supported ?

Answer 1

When you do:

hey=$(echo "hello world" | gzip -cf)

You don't have same same bytes in variable hey as you have in /tmp/myfile created by:

echo "hello world" | gzip -cf > /tmp/myfile

You get "gzip: stdin is a multi-part gzip file -- not supported" error simply because you have broken compressed data which cannot be uncompressed.

The VAR=$(...) construction is designed for working with text. This is why you get extra trailing trim for example.