tiny-inflate

What is tiny-inflate?

The tiny-inflate npm package is a minimal JavaScript implementation of the inflate algorithm, which is used for decompressing data compressed with the DEFLATE compression algorithm. It is designed to be small and efficient, suitable for use in environments where resources are limited or where only the inflate functionality is needed without the overhead of a full zlib implementation.

What are tiny-inflate's main functionalities?

Decompressing a DEFLATE-compressed buffer

This feature allows you to decompress a buffer of data that has been compressed using the DEFLATE algorithm. You need to provide the compressed data as a Uint8Array and an output buffer with the expected size of the decompressed data. After calling tinyInflate with these parameters, the output buffer will contain the decompressed data.

var tinyInflate = require('tiny-inflate');
var compressed = new Uint8Array([...]); // Your compressed data here
var output = new Uint8Array(outputSize); // Output buffer with a size you expect the decompressed data to be

tinyInflate(compressed, output);
// Now 'output' contains the decompressed data

Other packages similar to tiny-inflate

pako

Pako is a high-speed zlib port to JavaScript that works in the browser and node.js. It offers a similar inflate functionality but also includes deflate (compression), which tiny-inflate does not. Pako is more feature-rich and supports gzip wrapping as well.

zlibjs

zlibjs provides zlib compression/decompression wrapped in a JavaScript interface. It is similar to tiny-inflate in that it offers decompression, but it also includes compression and advanced options for tuning performance and compression. It is larger in size compared to tiny-inflate, which is more minimalistic.

fflate

fflate is a high-performance, low-complexity deflate/inflate compression algorithm implemented in JavaScript. It is similar to tiny-inflate but claims to be faster and more efficient, and it also supports both compression and decompression, unlike tiny-inflate which only supports decompression.

README

tiny-inflate

This is a port of Joergen Ibsen's tiny inflate to JavaScript. Minified it is about 3KB, or 1.3KB gzipped. While being very small, it is also reasonably fast (about 30% - 50% slower than pako on average), and should be good enough for many applications. If you need the absolute best performance, however, you'll need to use a larger library such as pako that contains additional optimizations.

Installation

npm install tiny-inflate

Example

To use tiny-inflate, you need two things: a buffer of data compressed with deflate, and the decompressed size (often stored in a file header) to allocate your output buffer. Input and output buffers can be either node Buffers, or Uint8Arrays.

var inflate = require('tiny-inflate');

var compressedBuffer = new Bufer([ ... ]);
var decompressedSize = ...;
var outputBuffer = new Buffer(decompressedSize);

inflate(compressedBuffer, outputBuffer);

License

MIT