Hello I have a problem with text storage, to which I seem to have found a solution, but it's a bit clumsy-looking. I would be grateful for confirmation that (a) there is no neater solution, (b) I can rely on this to work - I only know that it works in a few test cases. I need to store a large number of text strings in a database. To avoid the database files becoming too large, I am thinking of zipping the strings, or at least the less frequently accessed ones. Depending on the source, some of the strings will be instances of ByteString, some of WideString (because they contain characters not representable in one byte). Storing a WideString uncompressed seems to occupy 4 bytes per character, so I decided, before thinking of compression, to store the strings utf8Encoded, which yields a ByteArray. But zipped can only be applied to a String, not a ByteArray. So my proposed solution is: For compression: myZipString := myWideString utf8Encoded asString zipped. For decompression: myOutputString := myZipString unzipped asByteArray utf8Decoded. As I said, it works in all the cases I tried, whether WideString or not, but the chains of transformations look clunky somehow. Can anyone see a neater way of doing it? And can I rely on it working, especially when I am handling foreign texts with many multi-byte characters? Thanks in advance for any help. Peter Kenny