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Understanding Deflate


A very simple worked example

I’m trying to understand how Deflate works so decided to compress a simple string TOBEORNOTTOBEORTOBEORNOT using GZIP then decode the resulting file by hand. Further simplfying the output we can see there were various literal symbols and copy commands: In summary, encoding using bits instead of bytes can be quite effective in reducing data length, even in the short case the data was reduced from 24 to 16 bytes (strictly 15.75 without padding).

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Consider using Zstandard and/or LZ4 instead of Deflate