Shoco.jl is a Julia package that provides access to the compression and decompression functions in the Shoco C library. The algorithms are optimized for short strings and perform well in comparison to smaz, gzip, and xz. Compression is performed using entropy encoding.
Two functions are exported by this package: compress and decompress.
Both accept a single AbstractString argument and return a String.
It's important to note that the output from compress may not be valid UTF-8, which the String type doesn't care about, but your use case might.
Here's an example using the functions at the REPL.
julia> using Shoco
julia> compress("what's happening")
"؉'s ⎨<g"
julia> decompress("؉'s ⎨<g")
"what's happening"