cross-platform compress & decompress

[J. Landman Gay]

On 12/1/03 7:22 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Dave Cragg wrote:
>
>>Are you sure that's true, Richard? I use custom props for image data,
>>audio, and a host of other binary data but haven't noticed any cross
>>platform issues.
>
> I may be getting old and feeble, recalling merely a discussion of what would
> happen if the request were implemented.

I made the same misstatement here six months or so ago, and maybe for 
the same reason you did. I am sure I remember a note in  one of the 
"what's new" files in a version of MC a while back which said that line 
endings in custom props were now converted. I remember being relieved 
because I had some trouble with that once.

Folks here corrected me, and now I don't know whether line conversion 
worked for a while and then was reverted later on, or whether I just 
dreamed the whole thing.

> I can't recall a specific instance of custom props failing with binary data
> for me, so chalk that up to a lack of sleep until someone confirms/denies it
> empirically.

The reason I brought it up six months ago was because I was storing 
compressed data in a custom property that would not decompress on a 
different platform. If I compressed it on Mac it wouldn't decompress on 
Windows and vice versa. I never did get it to work. I had to create two 
versions of the compressed data, one for each platform. The data was all 
just plain ascii text, and I don't think there were any high-ascii 
characters in it.

> But the issue seems bigger than Mark and myself:  I recall a number of cases
> where using compress/decompress across platforms was discussed here as
> problematic, though I don't recall if storing them in user props or
> transmitting via sockets was a consistent part of the recipe.

That was me, for at least one of the times, and it was custom props. I 
haven't tested it again since then.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com