hacker,
I'm not trying to obfuscate the string,...
I couldn't resist. This is a 8bit <-> 7bit conversion utility so only ASCII 0 - 127 is supported.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $foo = compress( join '', 'a' .. 'z' );
print length $foo, "\n";
print grow( $foo );
sub compress {pack'b*',join'',map{sprintf'%b',ord}split//,pop}
sub grow {join'',map{chr oct"0b$_"}grep$_,split/(.{7})/,join'',map{vec
+"@_",$_,1}0..length("@_")*8-1}
With a reduction of 12.5%, I doubt you really want to use it though.