How do I compress a file in Gzip format?

In this code example we will learn how to compress a file using the gzip compression. By its nature, gzip can only compress a single file, you can not use it for compressing a directory and all the files in that directory.

Classes that you will be using to compress a file in gzip format includes the GZipOutputStream, FileInputStream and FileOutputStream classes. The steps for compressing a file described in the comments of the code snippet below.

package org.kodejava.util.zip;

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.zip.GZIPOutputStream;

public class GZipCompressExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // GZip input and output file.
        String sourceFile = "data.txt";
        String targetFile = "output.gz";

        try (
                // Create a file input stream of the file that is going to be
                // compressed.
                FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(sourceFile);

                // Create a file output stream then write the gzip result into
                // a specified file name.
                FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(targetFile);

                // Create a gzip output stream object with file output stream
                // as the argument.
                GZIPOutputStream gzos = new GZIPOutputStream(fos)) {

            // Define buffer and temporary variable for iterating the file
            // input stream.
            byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
            int length;

            // Read all the content of the file input stream and write it
            // to the gzip output stream object.
            while ((length = fis.read(buffer)) > 0) {
                gzos.write(buffer, 0, length);
            }

            // Finish file compressing and close all streams.
            gzos.finish();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

How do I compress Java objects?

This example demonstrates how to compress a Java object. We compress the Java object using GZIPOutputStream, pass it to ObjectOutputStream to write the object into an external file. The object we are going to compress will be represented by the User object. We need to make the User object serializable, so it must implement the java.io.Serializable interface. You can see the complete code snippet below.

package org.kodejava.util.zip;

import org.kodejava.util.support.User;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.ObjectOutputStream;
import java.util.zip.GZIPOutputStream;

public class ZipObjectDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        User admin = new User();
        admin.setId(1L);
        admin.setUsername("admin");
        admin.setPassword("secret");
        admin.setFirstName("System");
        admin.setLastName("Administrator");

        User foo = new User();
        foo.setId(2L);
        foo.setUsername("foo");
        foo.setPassword("secret");
        foo.setFirstName("Foo");
        foo.setLastName("Bar");

        System.out.println("Zipping....");
        System.out.println(admin);
        System.out.println(foo);

        File file = new File("user.dat");
        try (FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(file);
             GZIPOutputStream gos = new GZIPOutputStream(fos);
             ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(gos)) {

            oos.writeObject(admin);
            oos.writeObject(foo);
            oos.flush();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}
package org.kodejava.util.support;

import java.io.Serializable;

public class User implements Serializable {
    private Long id;
    private String username;
    private String password;
    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;

    public User() {
    }

    public Long getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public void setId(Long id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    public String getUsername() {
        return username;
    }

    public void setUsername(String username) {
        this.username = username;
    }

    public String getPassword() {
        return password;
    }

    public void setPassword(String password) {
        this.password = password;
    }

    public String getFirstName() {
        return firstName;
    }

    public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
    }

    public String getLastName() {
        return lastName;
    }

    public void setLastName(String lastName) {
        this.lastName = lastName;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "User{" +
                "id=" + id +
                ", username='" + username + '\'' +
                ", password='" + password + '\'' +
                ", firstName='" + firstName + '\'' +
                ", lastName='" + lastName + '\'' +
                '}';
    }
}

Running the code snippet will give us the following output:

Zipping....
User{id=1, username='admin', password='secret', firstName='System', lastName='Administrator'}
User{id=2, username='foo', password='secret', firstName='Foo', lastName='Bar'}