METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR REDUCING THE TIME REQUIRED FOR COMPRESSING DATA

摘要

The present invention provides a novel method and system for obtaining maximum system speed performance for compressing coded data. The novel pointer address used comprises a string code portion representative of the last matched string found in the dictionary and appended thereto an extension character code portion representative of the next character taken from the input data stream. The dictionary is constructed large enough to provide a unique memory location for every possible pointer address. The unique pointer address, representative of a string of data in the input data stream, is employed as an address pointer to access the memory. If no data is in memory at the address pointer the string has not been previously observed and a new unique compression coded is stored at the pointer address in memory for the string so that the next identical pointer address will read the code for the string from the dictionary.