Re: ASCII to ASCII compression.

On 06/06/2024 21:02, Malcolm McLean wrote:

On 06/06/2024 17:55, bart wrote:

On 06/06/2024 17:25, Malcolm McLean wrote:

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Not strictly a C programming question, but smart people will see the relavance to the topicality, which is portability.
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Is there a compresiion algorthim which converts human language ASCII text to compressed ASCII, preferably only "isgraph" characters?
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So "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow".
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Would become
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QWE£$543GtT£$"||x|VVBB?

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What's the problem with compressing to binary (using existing, efficient utilities), then turning that binary into ASCII (like Mime or Base64)?
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Because if a single bit flips in a zip archive, it's likely the entire archive will be lost. This scheme is robust. We can emed compressed text in programs, and if it is corruped, only a single line will become unreadable.

Ah, you want something that will work like your newsreader program that randomly changes letters or otherwise corrupts your spelling while leaving most of it readable?  :-)
Pass the data through a compressor and then add forward error checking mechanisms such as Reed-Solomon codes.  Then convert to ASCII base64 or similar.