How do you compress a string, and get a string back using zlib?

I am trying to utilize Zlib for text compression.

For example I have a string T='blah blah blah blah' I need to compress it for this string. I am using S=zlib.compress(T) to compress it. Now what I want is to get the non-binary form of S so that I can decompress T but in a different program.

Thanks!

EDIT: I guess I got a method to solve what I wanted. Here is the method:

import zlib, base64
text = 'STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW '
code =  base64.b64encode(zlib.compress(text,9))
print code

Which gives:

eNoLDnF09lbwD3MNcvPxD1cIHhxcAE9UKaU=

Now I can copy this code to a different program to get the original variable back:

import zlib, base64
s='eNoLDnF09lbwD3MNcvPxD1cIHhxcAE9UKaU='
data = zlib.decompress(base64.b64decode(s))
print data

Please suggest if you are aware of any other compression method which would give better results that are consistent with the above code.