Python has great in-built support for all sorts of text compression
including bzip, gzip, tarfile and other general purpose modules like
zlib etc.

Of these, I have a gripe with gzip - it does not provide a simple
way of compressing/uncompressing a string like the other modules
to (namely bzip, zlib) at the module level.

It is relatively easy to perform gzip de-compression using the
GzipFile class and StringIO objects, but compression is not
that straight-forward.

It would be great for the gzip module to have "compress"
and "uncompress" functions at the module level without having
to go through GzipFile every-time.

I think being able to send gzip compressed strings directly would be
useful for applications which require to send gzip data over the wire
without having to write to files and read-back.