Text Files

Scouser

Ok this is directed mainly at @atilim but if anybody else has any ideas please feel free to offer them.

I have all of the UK postcodes in 120 text files (they are actually tables but I thought renaming them would shrink the APK). The files contain long / latt coordinates for every postcode in UK and come in at a whopping 60+MB. So I thought text files would compress quite well within the APK - but they are exported as .txt.jet files and are stored in the APK uncompressed. Can anyone tell me why these files are stored uncompressed but the allfiles.txt is compressed?

Scouser

I think I can now answer my own question.

It would appear that Android versions < 2.3 cannot uncompress files who's uncompressed size > 1MB so that explains the raw data.

I also found that there is a list of file extensions that are stored uncompressed by default and .JET files are in this list.

So now the question is can we have a switch in the Project Projects dialog to allow us to turn off the .JET extension to allow compression of raw text / data files?

atilim

@Scouser - unfortunately we don't support loading of compressed files. Because it will make the loading code complicated and slower.

Scouser

@atilim: That's unfortunate but understandable. I do think that this may need to be addressed at sometime in the future as some projects start getting very large due to the size of data (rather than graphics which are not compressed anyway).

Discussing this same problem with @techdojo he suggested writing a plugin to handle it so I will try that later. Convert the lua tables to C/C++ structures and using a plugin to access the data.

One of the postcode files holds 41,000+ postcodes which can be reduced from 2.4MB to approx 500KB. This should reduce the total size down to a more manageable 13MB.

techdojo

And I also make coffee!

Scouser

@techdojo: Talking of which

techdojo

Kettles on!