Name

Message compression — (From RFC 1035, page 30)

Synopsis

In order to reduce the size of messages, the domain system utilizes a compression scheme which eliminates the repetition of domain names in a message. In this scheme, an entire domain name or a list of labels at the end of a domain name is replaced with a pointer to a prior occurrence of the same name.

The pointer takes the form of a two octet sequence:

    +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
    | 1  1|                OFFSET                   |
    +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+

The first two bits are ones. This allows a pointer to be distinguished from a label, since the label must begin with two zero bits because labels are restricted to 63 octets or less. (The 10 and 01 combinations are reserved for future use.) The OFFSET field specifies an offset from the start of the message (i.e., the first octet of the ID field in the domain header). A zero offset specifies the first byte of the ID field, etc.

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