help!, I don't know how to test my compression scheme

[RichardSouthwel]

Hi,
Im a mathematican and I recently came up with a new method for data compression that im eager to test against existing approaches. I have a visual basic prog that runs my method, but i dont know enough about computers to do comparisons.
My program takes in a binary string (i.e. 1000000000000111111) and outputs another, compressed binary string.
I would like to test winzips compression capabilities with binary strings. When I just ask winzip to compress a notpad containg the list of 0's and 1's it always achieves dramatic compression, and I guess thats cos its writing the output in some code that uses more characters or something (someone mentioned `acii', im confused). Basically I was wondering if one of you guys knew of any easy method (hopefully with vb) to convert a binary string to a file which i could then zip and get a relyable compression ratio. I suppose such a procedure will return a ratio ( compressed file size / initial file size) thats low for strings like 111111111111111111111111111111111111 and approaching 1 for random strings.