Show HN: PHP Compressed Strings Library | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PHP Compressed Strings Library

github.com

2 pointsorware2 comments

Most users on HN might not be too interested in a Library such as this (and I must admit the demo page I'm linking to above probably doesn't do the best job of explaining the background or utility of such a package), but hopefully a few of you will find it interesting.

As I mention in the page, I was drawn to the issue when I noticed how much memory was being used when I pulled a large data set from one of our Oracle databases here at work and I thought to myself, "Self, is there any better options?".

My main goal with the application I'm still working on, is to create a database proxy API (so I can submit a JSON request to this PHP application with an actual SQL query, that could then prepared/sent to the Oracle database and the results returned as JSON back to the user). Lots of security-related stuff I'm working on as well to make it happen in a way that won't cause any issues for the database, but this particular subproblem related to memory usage took up a few weeks of my time as I looked into and experimented with using JSON strings directly, and then into GZIP strings (particularly because GZIP was going to be the final output in most cases with Content Negotiation).

All in all it was pretty fun to build the package and just run various performance tests so if you have any questions feel free to ask and I hope someone might be able to use this in their own projects too :-).

Enjoy!

One other thing to add...in creating the demo I wanted to use the Shakespeare JSON data set that someone had shared at some point on here (they had shared the link).

I ended up having a bit of difficulty using it at first because it had some extra tab characters throughout the file and PHP's json_decode() function didn't quite tell me exactly where the problem was.

Other tools didn't seem to be useful either (online validators are only for small files typically and don't allow file uploads) and even Notepad++'s JSON related plugins didn't seem very helpful.

I finally ended up using the JSON Streaming package available for PHP which allowed me to run through the file and identify some of the offending lines.

Then I noticed a pattern of the tab character not being escaped in the line strings and just did a mass replace/removal of the tab characters in the file which then allowed me to create the sqlite shakespeare.db file included in the repository.

This by itself might be useful for others to use as well in their own projects :-).

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