Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > There are lossless compression algorithms for which what you > said is not true. I can't believe that. You can have a one-bit flag to indicate compression on or off. If the compression algorithm produces more output than input, then you can save the flag "0" plus the original file contents. If the compression is an improvement then you save the flag "1" plus the compressed data. So successfully compressed files are one bit larger than they could have been, with the benefit that uncompressible files do not get bloated by more than one bit. -- Donald Arseneau asnd@xxxxxxxxx
