Ok, I understand that now. But, my question is...How many bytes should your compressor check for at a time. What stops the compressor from taking the whole file as String1?

Would there be a way to create a calc hook that enables it to automatically figure out a limit if the denominatior = 0

I really do give up. lol. Sorry. Compression was never my strong point.

Edit: If someone want to write a compression/decompression routine, I will be eternally grateful. But, for the time being, I'm afraid, it is outside my skill level.

Think about this....

Take a number, n. Subtract 0 from it and keep going until n=0. Let me know when you're done.

If you think about it that way, you get infinity. Technically, infinity IS an undefined number (the textbook definition of infinity is the inability to assign a definite quantity).

Thanks, thepenguin. Instead of showing me the source code, can you perhaps try to give me an example stream of data, and then that same data compressed in LZ77. From there, perhaps I could decipher it.

I'm currently trying to decide whether this is amusing or annoying. One thing's for sure. It's hilarious. Not that I'd ever do it myself.

Well, my idea was this...

The program is made, then copied to Archive. A second program is created in RAM. The first one is compressed and copied into the second. The first is then deleted. The second is the compressed Archive. That is how compression works.

Decompression I need to think about.

I believe that I once read about an idea by another programmer to make an Archiver of sorts, with the capacity to work with the DCS file structure. I learned on Cemetech that he put the project on hold. Reading this sort of made me want to work on a similar program myself, mainly for practice with different data types.

It'll work similarly to WinRAR for Windows and Stuffit Expander for Mac. That's why I name it CalcRAR. This program will create an archive file, a specially-formatted program with data that CalcRAR will read to determine what files to create, data to put in the files, and where to put the files. The file, after creation, will be compressed. When it is read, it will be decompressed. The best part, you can run this program just as you would anything else, given CalcRAR installed. The Archive is designed with the DCS AP feature, so when you run it, CalcRAR unpackages the Archive, automatically runs the program, then returns to CalcRAR, which removes the unpacked files and quits.

The reason I posted is because I need some advice. Is RLE the best compression to go with here? Or is another type better? And I may actually need some help implementing it.