METHOD, CLIENT DEVICE, SERVER AND ARTICLE OF MANUFACTURE FOR COMPRESSING UNIVERSAL RESOURCE INDICATORS USING PARTITIONED LEFT/RIGHT STRING SUBSTITUTION

The present invention includes a method (700, 800, 900, 1200), client device (700, 800, 1000), server (900, 1100) and article of manufacture (700, 800, 900, 1000, 1100) for compressing/decompressing a current universal resource identifier URI using an immediately previous URI. The method for compressing the URI includes the steps of: partitioning the immediately previous URI and the current URI into a predetermined number of components; and comparing each component of the current URI with each corresponding component of the immediately previous URI from left-to-right LR and from right-to-left RL and encoding the current URI using concatenated compression indicators in accordance with counts of LR-matched characters, RL matched characters and uncompressed characters, wherein an escape byte is added to an end of the uncompressed characters when a last uncompressed character has a most significant bit set to one.