title: Zlib: What is the difference between inflating, encoding, and compressing a string?
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/621976/which-compression-method-to-use-in-php">Which compression method to use in PHP?</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>It seems that PHP has many <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/ref.zlib.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">functions for making smaller strings out of strings</a>. These functions are called inflate/deflate, encode/decode, and compress/uncompress. Some of them seem compatible with each other, as all are base on the <code>zlib</code> library. What is the differences between them, and when to use each?</p>