Pako is a full and modern Zlib port.
Here is a very simple example and you can work from there.
Get pako.js and you can decompress byteArray like so:
<html>
<head>
<title>Gunzipping binary gzipped string</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="pako.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Get datastream as Array, for example:
var charData = [31,139,8,0,0,0,0,0,0,3,5,193,219,13,0,16,16,4,192,86,214,151,102,52,33,110,35,66,108,226,60,218,55,147,164,238,24,173,19,143,241,18,85,27,58,203,57,46,29,25,198,34,163,193,247,106,179,134,15,50,167,173,148,48,0,0,0];
// Turn number array into byte-array
var binData = new Uint8Array(charData);
// Pako magic
var data = pako.inflate(binData);
// Convert gunzipped byteArray back to ascii string:
var strData = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, new Uint16Array(data));
// Output to console
console.log(strData);
</script>
</head>
<body>
Open up the developer console.
</body>
</html>
Running example: http://jsfiddle.net/9yH7M/
Alternatively you can base64 encode the array before you send it over as the Array takes up a lot of overhead when sending as JSON or XML. Decode likewise:
// Get some base64 encoded binary data from the server. Imagine we got this:
var b64Data = 'H4sIAAAAAAAAAwXB2w0AEBAEwFbWl2Y0IW4jQmziPNo3k6TuGK0Tj/ESVRs6yzkuHRnGIqPB92qzhg8yp62UMAAAAA==';
// Decode base64 (convert ascii to binary)
var strData = atob(b64Data);
// Convert binary string to character-number array
var charData = strData.split('').map(function(x){return x.charCodeAt(0);});
// Turn number array into byte-array
var binData = new Uint8Array(charData);
// Pako magic
var data = pako.inflate(binData);
// Convert gunzipped byteArray back to ascii string:
var strData = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, new Uint16Array(data));
// Output to console
console.log(strData);
Running example: http://jsfiddle.net/9yH7M/1/
To go more advanced, here is the pako API documentation.
