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 O(M) for a text of M 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.