While gzip compression is obviously better than this, which is more of an optimization, you can certainly pair this with gzip to get better results; albeit not

While gzip compression is obviously better than this, which is more of an optimization, you can certainly pair this with gzip to get better results; albeit not much: Sample JSON Object, using this technique: >>> Length (Original): 25565 >>> Length (Original, gzip): 3966 >>> Length (Using 90deg): 15626 >>> Length (using 90deg, gzip): 3633 So while the optimization gives you almost 10k bytes in size reduction, the gzipped result is only a 300 byte reduction in this example.