Patent attributes
A method for compressing a data stream includes transforming a data stream into a transformed data stream of referencing symbols and other data elements, the referencing symbols representing a data sequence identical to a data sequence in a reference data block; and encoding the referencing symbols by replacing them with codewords according to an encoding scheme, the transformed stream includes at least one control symbol indicating a change between a portion of the transformed data stream containing a sequence of the other data elements and a portion of the transformed data stream containing a sequence of the codewords for the referencing symbols, the location of the control symbol within the transformed data stream defines the end of the respective portion of the transformed data stream, the encoding scheme providing at least one codeword associated to one of the referencing symbols is longer than a codeword representing the control symbol.