On Sunday 18 March 2001 22:43, Dave Thomas wrote:
> I want to implement a compression scheme for some text, and I want to
> implement it in pure Ruby.
>
> I hacked up a simple LZW compressor (it was about 6 lines of Ruby) and
> it works fine, but I believe that the Unisys patent prevents the use
> of this in commercial applications. I tried basic RLE and Huffman, but
> the compression wasn't too good.
>

The Unisys patent, I believe, prevents the use of LZW in _any_ distributed 
application, commercial or otherwise, where licensing arrangements (meaning 
$$$ upfront) have not been made in advance.

> So could anyone recommend a scheme that's free for use, and which can
> be realistically decompressed in a handful of lines of Ruby?
>

I think the specs for zip, gzip and bzip are widely published. If I didn't 
have an early morning appointment, I would look some of these up for you, 
but... :-)

Kent Starr
elderburn / mindspring.com