Michael Davis wrote:
> What are rle_compress() and rle_decompress() supposed do?   Is it true that 
> bwt_compress() and bwt_decompress will only work on strings and not binary 
> data?

rle_compress and rle_decompress was a quick hack of RLE (run length encoding) compression.

Perhaps you'll have a look at a BWT-compressed file and you'll see 
that it is a bit more ordered than before. 
BWT only reorders data and because other compression methods rely on
redundant/ordered data this results in better compression. 

In Ruby, strings can hold binary data, so this will work with binary data, too.


--
Michael Neumann