Matlab compressed file format

[David Bateman]

Over the weekend I took a quick look at the Matlab V7 file format and
in particular the miCompressed data-type. It seems to be a pretty easy
format in that each data-element is compressed seperately, with an
8-byte header with the miCompressed flag and a 4-byte length of the
compressed block.

So the easiest way to treat this is to use zlib's uncompress function
on an mmaped version of the file, creating a decompressed version of
the data-element, and then using the exist code to parse that. However,
one thing I don't like about this is that there is a second copy of
the data in memory as the uncompressed data..

Do someone with a bit more experience with zlib know if there is a 
way to attach an open istream to a gzFile descriptor and then use the
functions gzread and gzwrite directly, so that I don't need a second
copy in memory of the data?

Regards
David

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David Bateman                                address@hidden
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