I want to implement a compression scheme for some text, and I want to
implement it in pure Ruby.

I hacked up a simple LZW compressor (it was about 6 lines of Ruby) and 
it works fine, but I believe that the Unisys patent prevents the use
of this in commercial applications. I tried basic RLE and Huffman, but 
the compression wasn't too good.

So could anyone recommend a scheme that's free for use, and which can
be realistically decompressed in a handful of lines of Ruby?

Thanks


Dave