[qub] zlib compression support added to save/load

[stephan b. <st...@wa...>]

Man, i've wanted this feature of AGES, and it was made simple by some code 
written back in 1997, left lying around on a web page who's "Last Updated" 
date is also in '97. Old stuff, but it works great:

SerialTree::saveToXMLFile( const QString &fn ) 
{
...
QString xml = toString();
ozipstream ostr( fn );
ostr << xml;
ostr.close();
...
}

That's all it took to compress all saved data (minus error checking and other 
boring stuff).

Object size comparisions with and without compression:

tray with 14 different single-sided pieces:
uncompressed: 14705 bytes
compressed: 1217 bytes

Board with 5 copies of the above tray:
uncompressed: 79020 bytes
compressed: 2254 bytes (!!!!!!!)

Funny story:

After saving my first object i wanted to see if it was really gzipped:

less Board.board

WHAT??? Not compressed?

After several minutes of piddling with it i finally remembered that less 
automatically decompresses files compressed with zlib, and realized it had 
been compressed all along :/.

<some time later...>

Loading works now, too. All file-based serialization now uses zlib 
compression. This means the config file is a pain in the butt to edit by hand 
:/ (and the config editor is broken, but that's unrelated). It can still load 
uncompressed files, too (but only because the zip streamer passes non-gzipped 
data through as-is).

The loading support is in SerialTree::loadFromXMLFile(), SerialTree-qxml.cpp.

see ya!

----- st...@wa...
http://qub.sourceforge.net  - http://radioaqtiph.sourceforge.net
http://www.countermoves.net - http://stephan.rootonfire.org
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sometimes you just find yourself over the line." -- Bob Dylan