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LZW Coding

This is an interactive demo for LZW coding in the form of simple .NET application.

LZW Coding (Lempel–Ziv–Welch) is universal lossless data compression coding based on adaptive content-based creation of dictionary on both encoding and decoding sides.

The focus of this demo is on suitable and easy to understand visualization. The codes of dictionary entries which in reality are numbers are visualized by different colors. Single letter dictionary entries that are there from the beginning are not very interesting so all of these are represented by different shades of one color (red). Entries with more than one letter are the ones which are interesting because here is where the compression happens so these are represented by different colors to be easily distinguishable during both encoding and decoding.

Download LZW coding interactive demo