Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

February 23, 2015

How gzip uses Huffman coding

Filed under: Compression — Patrick Durusau @ 10:58 am

How gzip uses Huffman coding by Julia Evans.

From the post:

I wrote a blog post quite a while ago called gzip + poetry = awesome where I talked about how the gzip compression program uses the LZ77 algorithm to identify repetitions in a piece of text.

In case you don’t know what LZ77 is (I sure didn’t), here’s the video from that post that gives you an example of gzip identifying repetitions in a poem!

Julia goes beyond the video to illustrate how Huffman encoding is used by gzip to compress a text.

She includes code, pointers to other resources, basically all you need to join her in exploring the topic at hand. An education style that many manuals and posts would do well to adopt.

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