Steve Howell <showel...@yahoo.com> writes: > Sounds like a useful technique. The text snippets that I'm > compressing are indeed mostly English words, and 7-bit ascii, so it > would be practical to use a compression library that just uses the > same good-enough encodings every time, so that you don't have to write > the encoding dictionary as part of every small payload.
Zlib stays adaptive, the idea is just to start with some ready-made compression state that reflects the statistics of your data. > Sort of as you suggest, you could build a Huffman encoding for a > representative run of data, save that tree off somewhere, and then use > it for all your future encoding/decoding. Zlib is better than Huffman in my experience, and Python's zlib module already has the right entry points. Looking at the docs, Compress.flush(Z_SYNC_FLUSH) is the important one. I did something like this before and it was around 20 lines of code. I don't have it around any more but maybe I can write something else like it sometime. > Is there a name to describe this technique? Incremental compression maybe? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list