I work with a propriety client/server message format that restricts what I can send over the wire. I can't send a serialized object, I have to store the data in the message as a String. The data I am sending are large comma-separated values, and I want to compress the data before I pack it into the message as a String.

I attempted to use Deflater/Inflater to achieve this, but somewhere along the line I am getting stuck.

I am using the two methods below to deflate/inflate. However, passing the result of the compressString() method to decompressStringMethod() returns a null result.

```
public String compressString(String data) {
  Deflater deflater = new Deflater();
  byte[] target = new byte[100];
  try {
   deflater.setInput(data.getBytes(UTF8_CHARSET));
   deflater.finish();
   int deflateLength = deflater.deflate(target);
   return new String(target);
  } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
   //TODO
  }

  return data;
 }

 public String decompressString(String data) {

  String result = null;
  try {
   byte[] input = data.getBytes();

   Inflater inflater = new Inflater();
   int inputLength = input.length;
   inflater.setInput(input, 0, inputLength);

   byte[] output = new byte[100];
   int resultLength = inflater.inflate(output);
   inflater.end();

   result = new String(output, 0, resultLength, UTF8_CHARSET);
  } catch (DataFormatException e) {
   // TODO Auto-generated catch block
   e.printStackTrace();
  } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
   // TODO Auto-generated catch block
   e.printStackTrace();
  }

  return result;
 }

```