Text Processing in Python

Appendix B. A Data Compression Primer

Introduction

See Section 2.2.5 for details on compression capabilities included in the Python standard library. This appendix is intended to provide readers who are unfamiliar with data compression a basic background on its techniques and theory. The final section of this appendix provides a practical example—accompanied by some demonstration code—of a Huffman-inspired custom encoding.

Data compression is widely used in a variety of programming contexts. All popular operating systems and programming languages have numerous tools and libraries for dealing with data compression of various sorts. The right choice of compression tools and libraries for a particular application depends on the characteristics ...