Compressed saving of networks

[dlohmeier]

I believe that this has already been discussed a few times, but it seems to me that compression of pandapower networks has not yet been implemented yet, so each user has to find his own solution. In my case, I tried to save a JSON string with gzip and it worked perfectly, compressing the 550 KB of initial data to 60 KB. That makes my studies a lot easier, in which I need to save different network configurations as results many times. What do you think about the idea of implementing a new way to store networks? Here are my code snippets:

def to_gzip(net, filename, compresslevel=9):
    net_str = pp.to_json(net).encode("utf-8")
    with gzip.open(filename, "wb", compresslevel=compresslevel) as fl:
        fl.write(net_str)


def from_gzip(filename):
    with gzip.open(filename, 'rb') as fl:
        net_str = fl.read()
        return pp.from_json_string(net_str)

Of course, this would increase the number of functions included in pandapower, but I think it could be really useful in some cases.

[MacsBO]

I agree, I also wrote some functions to compress json and save a lot of disk space: having a standard pandapower routine would be perfect!