An efficient compression algorithm for short text strings [closed]

Check out Smaz:

Smaz is a simple compression library suitable for compressing very short strings.

Huffman has a static cost, the Huffman table, so I disagree it's a good choice.

There are adaptative versions which do away with this, but the compression rate may suffer. Actually, the question you should ask is "what algorithm to compress text strings with these characteristics". For instance, if long repetitions are expected, simple Run-Lengh Encoding might be enough. If you can guarantee that only English words, spaces, punctiation and the occasional digits will be present, then Huffman with a pre-defined Huffman table might yield good results.

Generally, algorithms of the Lempel-Ziv family have very good compression and performance, and libraries for them abound. I'd go with that.

With the information that what's being compressed are URLs, then I'd suggest that, before compressing (with whatever algorithm is easily available), you CODIFY them. URLs follow well-defined patterns, and some parts of it are highly predictable. By making use of this knowledge, you can codify the URLs into something smaller to begin with, and ideas behind Huffman encoding can help you here.

For example, translating the URL into a bit stream, you could replace "http" with the bit 1, and anything else with the bit "0" followed by the actual procotol (or use a table to get other common protocols, like https, ftp, file). The "://" can be dropped altogether, as long as you can mark the end of the protocol. Etc. Go read about URL format, and think on how they can be codified to take less space.