String Encoding Algorithm

Question

Is there is a way to reduce the length of a string
using String encoding algorithm.

Unfortunately "Huffman coding" is not a solution for my case. I am searching for a coding algorithm which takes a string and generate a string which is shorter than the original string(input).

You can base64 encode the data produced by Huffman coding. Not sure whether it is shorter, but it will produce a printable string. — nhahtdh
– nhahtdh, Commented Jun 18, 2012 at 4:33

Antimony · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-18 04:37:30Z

2

There is no way to shorten an arbitrary string, just as there is no general compression method that works in all cases. So what you need to do is pick a compression method that apples to your expected inputs and use that. Then you just need to convert the results back to a string.

In case you were merely wondering how to convert the results back to a string, there are again any number of ways. Base64 is easy and works well enough. However, it has a 25% overhead compared to a pure binary encoded string.

answered Jun 18, 2012 at 4:37

Antimony

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2 Comments

obataku Over a year ago

Actually, I believe Base64 has ~33% overhead.

Antimony Over a year ago

Sorry, you're right. The overhead is 33% of the original string and 25% of the encoded string.

U2EF1 · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-18 07:00:09Z

2

Hopefully this answers your intended question. There is a library, smaz which compresses short English strings efficiently. Perhaps luckily for you, it actually encodes the string. If your strings aren't English, the general method used by smaz (a static dictionary) can be used with other compressors.

answered Jun 18, 2012 at 7:00

U2EF1

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Keshan De Silva Over a year ago

Thank you for the information. This library may be suitable for my case. But the implementation is in C. I am searching for a Java and/or c# implementation.

U2EF1 Over a year ago

@KeshanDeSilva It's a very small program, you should be able to convert it by hand pretty easily. Good luck!

Sergei Danielian · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-18 04:39:14Z

0

See "English Text compression test". In the article you will find almost all possible algorithms to compress an english text. May be some of them could satisfy your requirements.

answered Jun 18, 2012 at 4:39

Sergei Danielian

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