String Data Compression

Question

Is there a way to take a long string and compress it into a
much shorter string?
Here's an example string, a comma-delimited set of values:
cd,1111-1111-11-1,d120700000a72cbj001c,46808598,60,1,030308,060108
I'd like to shrink it down to a 10-12 character string that a
user can input.
Does anyone know of any tools to perform this?

Answer 1

but if you are sending your users an email - why not include
a simple
link they can click on in the email?
that link would have a url parameter - either your original
full string
or an encrypted one - something like:
http://somesite.com/somepage.cfm?c=cd,1111-1111-11-1,d120700000a72cbj001c,46808598,60,1,03 0308,060108
[in the email tell your users to click on the included link
or
copy/paste it into their browser]
somepage.cfm is your form page - make it insert the #url.c#
variable
into appropriate form field automatically, or parse #url.c#
first and
insert parts of the string into appropriate fields -
basically do
whatever you need to do with that string.
[obviously also include some checks to make sure url.c is
there and is
in correct format and the values it contains are valid]
hth
Azadi Saryev
Sabai-dee.com
http://www.sabai-dee.com/