ruby-xz

ruby-xz is a basic binding to the famous liblzma library, best known for the extreme compression-ratio it's native XZ format achieves. ruby-xz gives you the possibility of creating and extracting XZ archives on any platform where liblzma is installed. No compilation is needed, because ruby-xz is written ontop of ffi.

ruby-xz supports both "intuitive" (de)compression by providing methods to directly operate on strings and files, but also allows you to operate directly on IO streams (see the various methods of the XZ module). On top of that, ruby-xz offers an advanced interface that allows you to treat XZ-compressed data as IO streams, both for reading and for writing. See the XZ::StreamReader and XZ::StreamWriter classes for more information on this.

Installation

Install it the way you install all your gems.

$ gem install ruby-xz

Alternatively, you can clone the repository and build the most recent code yourself:

$ git clone git://github.com/Quintus/ruby-xz.git
$ cd ruby-xz
$ rake gem
$ gem install pkg/ruby-xz-*.gem

Usage

The documentation of the XZ module is well and you should be able to find everything you need to use ruby-xz. As said, it's not big, but powerful: You can create and extract whole archive files, compress or decompress streams of data or just plain strings.

You can read the documentation on your local gemserver, or browse it online.

First step

You have to require ruby-xz. Note the file you have to require is named "xz.rb", so do

require "xz"

to get it.

Examples

# Compress a TAR archive
XZ.compress_file("myfile.tar", "myfile.tar.xz")
# Decompress it
XZ.decompress_file("myfile.tar.xz", "myfile.tar")

# Compress everything you get from a socket (note that there HAS to be a EOF
# sometime, otherwise this will run infinitely)
XZ.compress_stream(socket){|chunk| opened_file.write(chunk)}

# Compress a string
comp = XZ.compress("Mydata")
# Decompress it
data = XZ.decompress(comp)

Have a look at the XZ module's documentation for an in-depth description of what is possible.

License

(The MIT License)

Basic liblzma-bindings for Ruby.

See AUTHORS for the full list of contributors.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.