On 3/26/09 12:30 PM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> Robert Rohde wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Ilmari Karonen<[email protected]>  wrote:
>>> Hmm?  Admittedly, I don't know the bzip2 format very well, but as far as
>>> I understand it, there should be no bit-shifting involved: each block in
>>> the stream is a completely independent, self-contained sequence of bytes.
>> I believe the point is that each block is a self-contained sequence of
>> bits not bytes, so a block can terminate in the middle of a byte.  The
>> next block is appended immediately (if I understand correctly), so
>> block boundaries do not necessarily align to byte boundaries.  Hence
>> the need to do bit shifting.
>
> The Wikipedia article (what else?) on the format says the blocks are
> padded to byte boundaries, and some quick testing seems to support that.

That is a filthy lie. :)

There is indeed no byte padding between blocks; it made my 
implementation of a parallel bzip2 compressor much harder and I never 
got round to finishing the decompressor.

-- brion

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