...

There is no wasted space, so there is nothing that can be improved.

Do you compress the strings (e.g. LZW) or are you just packing them

efficiently?

My understanding from the original post is that he wanted the strings stored as given, not compressed. The macros simply store the strings end-to-end without any gaps. However, the macros would work equally for compressed strings, assuming they have the same form, namely length field and data string.

If you want the entire body of strings compressed as a unit, then you could use the macros to create the concatenation of all the individual strings, and compress the result. It would be up to you to devise methods for accessing the strings within the compressed mass.

Frank Rubin