Better OPM/L Text Compression

An OPM/L data compression scheme suggested by Ziv and Lempel, LZ77, is applied to text compression. A slightly modified version suggested by Storer and Szymanski, LZSS, is found to achieve compression ratios as good as most existing schemes for a wide range of texts. LZSS decoding is very fast, and comparatively little memory is required for encoding and decoding. Although the time complexity of LZ77 and LZSS encoding is <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">O(M)</tex> for a text of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">M</tex> characters, straightforward implementations are very slow. The time consuming step of these algorithms is a search for the longest string match. Here a binary search tree is used to find the longest string match, and experiments show that this results in a dramatic increase in encoding speed. The binary tree algorithm can be used to speed up other OPM/L schemes, and other applications where a longest string match is required. Although the LZSS scheme imposes a limit on the length of a match, the binary tree algorithm will work without any limit.