PHP & File Compression/Archiving techniques

PHP has some very easy, simple yet powerful, extensions for file compression support. zip, gZip, bZip2, LZF libraries are popular extensions with php. Each one is actually a different compression format... all of them have their own algorithms to compress files, and some of them support mentioning which compression algorithm you want to use, while creating/opening a compressed file. We will look at some of the features of these libraries with reference to PHP.