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Concept
Dictionary coder
Summary
A dictionary coder, also sometimes known as a substitution coder, is a class of lossless data compression algorithms which operate by searching for matches between the text to be compressed and a set of strings contained in a data structure (called the 'dictionary') maintained by the encoder. When the encoder finds such a match, it substitutes a reference to the string's position in the data structure.
Some dictionary coders use a 'static dictionary', one whose full set of strings is determined before coding begins and does not change during the coding process. This approach is most often used when the message or set of messages to be encoded is fixed and large; for instance, an application that stores the contents of a book in the limited storage space of a PDA generally builds a static dictionary from a concordance of the text and then uses that dictionary to compress the verses. This scheme of using Huffman coding to represent indices into a concordance has been called "Huffword".
In a related and more general method, a dictionary is built from redundancy extracted from a data environment (various input streams) which dictionary is then used statically to compress a further input stream. For example, a dictionary is built from old English texts then is used to compress a book.
More common are methods where the dictionary starts in some predetermined state but the contents change during the encoding process, based on the data that has already been encoded. Both the LZ77 and LZ78 algorithms work on this principle. In LZ77, a circular buffer called the "sliding window" holds the last N bytes of data processed. This window serves as the dictionary, effectively storing every substring that has appeared in the past N bytes as dictionary entries. Instead of a single index identifying a dictionary entry, two values are needed: the length, indicating the length of the matched text, and the offset (also called the distance), indicating that the match is found in the sliding window starting offset bytes before the current text.
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