Abstract: Because consuming extensive processor resources to directly compress textual messages for transmission in a data communication network is viewed as undesirable, a method of message compression in accordance with the present invention applies simple tokenization to certain fields in a message and then combines at least two of the tokens to produce a compact tokenized message that is up to 30% smaller than the original message. Thereafter, the tokenized message can optionally be compressed further utilizing a standard compression algorithm, such as Lempel-Ziv 1977 (LZ77), to attain a substantial compression ratio. Applying a standard compression scheme, such as LZ77, after tokenization is not as processor-intensive as direct compression of the original message and can decrease the message size by an additional 10%.