Compression Random Access

Tags

text-processing

The ability to access sections of a compressed file directly. You can read part of a compressed file without first having to decompress all of it.

Good compression techniques [see page 12, make] random access difficult, because:

• variable length encoding can't start decoding at a random point. They have to be on a code boundary.
• adaptive models cannot determine the model without decoding all prior text first.

Note: There's no good random access solution for adaptive modelling.