[Chicago-talk] ASCII compression?

Jim Thomason thomasoniii at gmail.com
Thu Oct 28 15:46:10 CDT 2004


Anybody know of any good algorithms to do ascii-only compression?

That is, I'm going to spit in ascii data, and I want to read out ascii data.

More specifically, I have 14 chunks of 6 numbers. And I want to
compress it all into a single string that contains only upper case
letters and numbers that can be later decompressed and broken back
into those 14 chunks.

Currently, I'm base-36 encoding the chunks. It seems to save me 33% of
the space, 6 digits -> 4 digits.

Further, ideally, I'd like to avoid using an external lookup table. If
I'm going to have an external table, I'd just dump my entire value
into it and then read it out as a single integer ID lookup value. :-)
I may end up just falling back on this, though.

Any suggestions?

-Jim.....


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