Compressing / Decompressing Folders & Files

Does anyone know of a good way to compress or decompress files and folders in C# quickly? Handling large files might be necessary.

Solution 1:

The .Net 2.0 framework namespace System.IO.Compression supports GZip and Deflate algorithms. Here are two methods that compress and decompress a byte stream which you can get from your file object. You can substitute GZipStream for DefaultStream in the methods below to use that algorithm. This still leaves the problem of handling files compressed with different algorithms though.

public static byte[] Compress(byte[] data)
{
    MemoryStream output = new MemoryStream();

    GZipStream gzip = new GZipStream(output, CompressionMode.Compress, true);
    gzip.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
    gzip.Close();

    return output.ToArray();
}

public static byte[] Decompress(byte[] data)
{
    MemoryStream input = new MemoryStream();
    input.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
    input.Position = 0;

    GZipStream gzip = new GZipStream(input, CompressionMode.Decompress, true);

    MemoryStream output = new MemoryStream();

    byte[] buff = new byte[64];
    int read = -1;

    read = gzip.Read(buff, 0, buff.Length);

    while (read > 0)
    {
        output.Write(buff, 0, read);
        read = gzip.Read(buff, 0, buff.Length);
    }

    gzip.Close();

    return output.ToArray();
}

Solution 2:

I've always used the SharpZip Library.

Here's a link