This is a very simple work-around for sending the compressed data--it's not nearly as good as lz-string natively but it's the best I could come up with to safely transport the data.  This would be better wrapped into lz-string as an option that could be a

This isn't nearly as compressed as lz-string natively but still yields
considerable savings over uncompressed and uses only basic characters.
A simple test of a JSON object:

- 676,000  uncompressed
- 39,000    compressed
- 154,000  compressed & encoded