pako Documentation

Technical Documentation: nodeca/pako

ℹ️ Provenance: Multi-Tier Ingestion · CodeWiki Reference

Overview (`README.md`) Copy Section

pako

Very fast zlib-compatible compression for JavaScript.

Why pako is cool Copy Chapter

• Binary-equivalent output. Pako can produce the same deflate/gzip bytes as
  original zlib (1.3.2) and Node.js' patched zlib.
• Tiny browser bundles. Full minified bundle is under 15K gzipped.
  Deflate-only and inflate-only builds are smaller.
• Very fast. Performance is comparable with native zlib in modern JavaScript
  engines (see benchmarks).

Benchmarks Copy Chapter

node v24, 1 MB input sample:

deflate-pako x 14.27 ops/sec ±3.41% (37 runs sampled)
deflate-pako-zlib-hash x 10.60 ops/sec ±0.50% (29 runs sampled)
deflate-zlib x 30.30 ops/sec ±0.61% (51 runs sampled)
gzip-pako x 13.48 ops/sec ±0.50% (36 runs sampled)
inflate-pako x 138 ops/sec ±1.26% (75 runs sampled)
inflate-zlib x 397 ops/sec ±1.37% (81 runs sampled)
ungzip-pako x 125 ops/sec ±1.46% (73 runs sampled)

Install Copy Chapter

npm install pako

[!NOTE]
For a quick look at dist/ folder contents, see
https://unpkg.com/pako@latest/.

Examples / API Copy Chapter

Full docs - http://nodeca.github.io/pako/

import { Deflate, Inflate, deflate, inflate } from 'pako';

// Deflate
//
const input = new Uint8Array();
//... fill input data here
const output = deflate(input);

// Inflate (simple wrapper can throw exception on broken stream)
//
const compressed = new Uint8Array();
//... fill data to uncompress here
try {
  const result = inflate(compressed);
  // ... continue processing
} catch (err) {
  console.log(err);
}

//
// Alternate interface for chunking & without exceptions
//

const deflator = new Deflate();

deflator.push(chunk1, false);
deflator.push(chunk2); // second param is false by default.
...
deflator.push(chunk_last, true); // `true` says this chunk is last

if (deflator.err) {
  console.log(deflator.msg);
}

const output = deflator.result;


const inflator = new Inflate();

inflator.push(chunk1);
inflator.push(chunk2);
...
inflator.push(chunk_last); // no second param because end is auto-detected

if (inflator.err) {
  console.log(inflator.msg);
}

const output = inflator.result;

For CommonJS:

const { deflate, inflate } = require('pako');

If you need the whole API as an object, use namespace import:

import * as pako from 'pako';

Sometimes you may wish to work with strings — for example, to send
stringified objects to a server. Pako's deflate detects the input data type and
automatically recodes strings to utf-8 prior to compression. High-level inflate
helpers can decode utf-8 output back to JavaScript strings with toText: true.

import { deflate, inflate } from 'pako';

const test = { my: 'super', puper: [456, 567], awesome: 'pako' };

const compressed = deflate(JSON.stringify(test));

const restored = JSON.parse(inflate(compressed, { toText: true }));

Notes Copy Chapter

Pako does not contain some specific zlib functions:

• deflate - methods deflateCopy, deflateBound, deflateParams,
  deflatePending, deflatePrime, deflateTune.
• inflate - methods inflateCopy, inflateMark,
  inflatePrime, inflateGetDictionary, inflateSync, inflateSyncPoint, inflateUndermine.
• High level inflate/deflate wrappers (classes) may not support some flush
  modes.

Authors Copy Chapter

• Andrey Tupitsin @anrd83
• Vitaly Puzrin @puzrin

Personal thanks to:

• Vyacheslav Egorov (@mraleph) for his awesome
  tutorials about optimising JS code for v8, IRHydra
  tool and his advices.
• David Duponchel (@dduponchel) for help with
  testing.

Original implementation (in C):

• zlib by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler.

License Copy Chapter

• MIT - all files, except /src/zlib folder
• ZLIB - /src/zlib content

Overview (`benchmark/README.md`) Copy Section

Dev sandbox

Helpers to measure performance & create benchmarks.

Setup Copy Chapter

npm i

Benchmarking Copy Chapter

./benchmark.js

Profiling Copy Chapter

node --prof profile.js
node --prof-process isolate-0xnnnnnnnnnnnn-v8.log

Overview (`examples/browser-to-server/README.md`) Copy Section

Browser to server

This example sends compressed JSON from a browser to a Node.js server.

Run node server.mjs and open http://localhost:8000/.

Warning! This is the sample only, to show data reencoding steps. It does
not have error checks and so on. Don't copy-paste to production code "as is".

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• Canonical Reference: https://codewiki.google/github.com/nodeca/pako