Observations on Compressing Text Files of Varying Length

• Published in: Fifth International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations (itng 2008) pp. 224 - 228
• Main Authors: Btoush, M.H., Siddiqi, J., Akhgar, B., Dawahdeh, Z.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-04-2008
• Subjects: Binary trees; Compression algorithms; Compressors; Data compression; Encoding; Entropy; Huffman Coding; Image coding; Image storage; LZW; Probability; Text size; Video compression
• ISBN: 0769530990; 9780769530994
• DOI: 10.1109/ITNG.2008.61

The paper compares different data compression algorithms of text files: LZW, Huffman, fixed-length code (FLC), and Huffman after using fixed-length code (HFLC). We compare these algorithms on different text files of different sizes in terms of compression scales of: size, ratio, time (speed), and entropy. Our evaluation reveals that initially for smaller size files the simplest algorithm namely LZW performs worst for first two scales than the more complex Huffman algorithm but as the size of the text increases interestingly the position is reversed. Moreover for the scales time and entropy LZW performs better than Huffmans but for larger files once again the position is reversed.