A way to decompress strings which have been compress with deflate encoding, zlib encoding or gzip encoding would be great; it provides developers who use HttpService an easy way to compress data so they use less bandwidth when sending data. ROBLOX already accepts deflate-encoding in HttpService already to inflate the entire request, so it would just be a matter of adding a method to HttpService to do the same.
Such an API would be sort of problematic because it would end up with “fighting” with the compression that Roblox already does within a lot of parts of the API.
If it were easily provided like that then people would keep trying to be “clever” and put compressed strings in their place files, and save compressed data to the data-store, while those parts of the API are already internally compressing the data going through them. The result would be that they’d actually end up increasing the amount of space needed to transmit / store the data in question, because the second round of compression would often end up increasing the size of the data.
That’s why I haven’t tried to get such an API included yet.
If internally parts of the API already compress data, would it be worth mentioning in places like the Wiki that there is no real point in manually compressing the data? I’m asking for this because the temporary Apache server I’m running on my computer doesn’t have mod_deflate, so to compress data I need to use a function to do that. I’m also sending quite a bit of data (>1MB) which changes dynamically to load most of my main server-side.