The present invention includes a method (500, 600, 700, 800), client device (900, 1000), server (1100, 1200) and article of manufacture (900, 1000, 1100, 1200) for compressing/decompressing a universal resource identifier URI. The method includes the steps of: determining, starting at a first end of a string, a first count of characters that sequentially match between a previous register and a current register; determining, starting at a second end of the string, a second count of characters that sequentially match between the previous register and the current register, and encoding the URI based on the first count and the second count.