Bzip2::FFI

Bzip2::FFI is a Ruby wrapper for libbz2 using FFI bindings.

The Bzip2::FFI Reader and Writer classes support reading and writing bzip2 compressed data as an IO-like stream.

The Bzip2::FFI gem can be installed by running gem install bzip2-ffi or by adding gem 'bzip2-ffi' to your Gemfile and running bundle install.

Bzip2::FFI requires a minimum of Ruby MRI 1.9.3 or JRuby 1.7 (in 1.9 mode or later).

Bzip2::FFI is a pure-Ruby library that uses Ruby-FFI (Foreign Function Interface) to load the libbz2 dynamic library at runtime.

libbz2 is available as a package on most UNIX-based systems (for example, libbz2-1.0 on Debian and Ubuntu, or bzip2-libs on Fedora, Red Hat and CentOS).

On Windows, you will need to have libbz2.dll or bz2.dll available on the PATH or in the Ruby bin directory.

Suitable builds of libbz2.dll are available from the bzip2-windows project. Download the DLL only package that matches your Ruby installation (x86 or x64) and extract to your ruby\bin directory.

Builds from the bzip2-windows project depend on the Visual Studio C Runtime Library. Links to the installer can be found on the bzip2-windows releases page.

To use Bzip2::FFI, it must first be loaded with:

require 'bzip2/ffi'

Data can be compressed using the Bzip2::FFI::Writer class. For example, the following compresses lines read from ARGF (either standard input, or file names given as command-line arguments):

Bzip2::FFI::Writer.open(io_or_path) do |writer|
  ARGF.each_line do |line|
    writer.write(line)
  end
end

Alternatively, without passing a block to open:

writer = Bzip2::FFI::Writer.open(io_or_path)
begin
  ARGF.each_line do |line|
    writer.write(line)
  end
ensure
  writer.close
end

An entire bzip2 structure can also be written in a single step:

Bzip2::FFI::Writer.write(io_or_path, 'Hello, World!')

In each of the examples above, io_or_path can either be a path to a file to write to or an IO-like object that has a #write method.

Data can be decompressed using the Bzip2::FFI::Reader class. For example:

Bzip2::FFI::Reader.open(io_or_path) do |reader|
  while buffer = reader.read(1024) do
    # process uncompressed bytes in buffer
  end
end

Alternatively, without passing a block to open:

reader = Bzip2::FFI::Reader.open(io_or_path)
begin
  while buffer = reader.read(1024) do
    # process uncompressed bytes in buffer
  end
ensure
  reader.close
end

All the available bzipped data can also be read and decompressed in a single step:

uncompressed = Bzip2::FFI::Reader.read(io_or_path)

In each of the examples above, io_or_path can either be a path to a file to read from or an IO-like object that has a #read method.

Bzip2::FFI does not perform any encoding conversion when reading or writing. Data read using Bzip2::FFI::Reader is returned as String instances with ASCII-8BIT (BINARY) encoding representing the raw decompressed bytes. Bzip2::FFI::Writer compresses the raw bytes from the String instances passed to the #write method (using the encoding of the String).

Bzip2::FFI compresses and decompresses data as a stream, allowing large files to be handled without requiring the complete contents to be held in memory.

When decompressing, 4 KB of compressed data is read at a time. An additional 4 KB is required to pass the data to libbz2. Decompressed data is output in blocks dictated by the length passed to Bzip2::FFI::Reader#read (defaulting to 4 KB and requiring twice the length in memory to read from libbz2).

When compressing, up to 4 KB of compressed data is written at a time, requiring up to 8 KB of memory. An additional copy is also taken of the String passed to Bzip2::FFI::Writer#write.

Internally, libbz2 allocates additional memory according to the bzip2 block size. Please refer to the Memory Management section of the Bzip2 documentation for details.

Documentation for Bzip2::FFI is available on RubyDoc.info.

Bzip2::FFI is distributed under the terms of the MIT license. A copy of this license can be found in the included LICENSE file.

Source code, release information and the issue tracker can be found on the Bzip2::FFI GitHub project page.