Implementation of Compression and Decompression using LZW Algorithm

Abstract

Abstract

Many compression techniques are used to minimize the amount of memory that is to be used to store the data. One such compression technique is by using LZW algorithm. The purpose of this is to present a data compression and decompression software to reduce the amount of memory used for storing data. By using data compression, stream of symbols is transformed into codes. For effective compression, the resultant stream of codes will be smaller than the original symbol. LZW is a "dictionary"-based compression algorithm. Here, to encode a substring, only a single code number is used, corresponding to the substring's index in the dictionary, which will be written to the output file. LZW algorithm finds its application in data compression and performs best on files with repeated substrings, such as text files.

Keywords: LZW, compression, decompression, index, string