> 2007/5/15, Ball, Donald A Jr (Library) <donald.ball / nashville.gov>:
> <snip>
> > I also tried writing a binary encoder which packs and 
> unpacks the bit 
> > strings generated by my string encoder, but it fails to 
> decompress the 
> > entire text for long files, e.g. the program source code 
> itself. I'm 
> > unsure why, perhaps someone more experienced in this arena 
> can suggest 
> > why.
> 
> Perhaps because the file you want to encode already contains 
> your end-marker. The decoder stops when it encounters the 
> first end-marker (line 161). A binary file would not be 
> unlikely to contain a NULL character somewhere.

That was my first thought, but I threw in a check for the existence of
NULL characters in the frequency hash before merging the EOS=>0 hash,
and it did not complain. Besides, the file I'm trying to decompress is
the ruby source of my quiz solution, which is just plain ol' text.

- donald