Thread: Compressing

Well, I would like to know if there already made functions that compress data. Like functions that you enter the data, as an array, and you get the compressed data, a smaller array. Then a function that extracts the data from the compressed form.

I don't have any specific compression algorithm in mind. I m interested in a very general compression method that can compress any kind of values. Lets say an array of doubles. Even an ineffective (both in time and space) function will do.

I searched didn't really find anything. But you never know, so I though to ask here. Of course what I am asking might not even be possible. The closest thing I found is programs that can compress data, providing also code in C. But they had a lot of parameteres, I would have to find the specific functions/algorithms etc etc. I would want something very easy to use

EDIT: argh, my english is horrible

You could look up the immensely simple lossless compression algorithm called Run-encoding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding

Another relatively simple and lossless compression algorithm is "BytePair Encoding", which assumes that the data contains pairs of bytes that have the same value, and that you can replace those with another single byte. Perform this recursively until there are no longer any pairs.

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Mats