Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression algorithm

This is an implementation in C99 of the LZW compression algorithm.

Build

$ gcc -O1 compress.c -o compress
$ gcc -O1 decompress.c -o decompress

Compress a file

Currently when running the compress binary file from the command line the application will compress the file input.txt present in the folder and, as a result, you will get the file compressed.dat. Those filenames are hardcoded in the source code, so I encourage you to modify the code to allow pass an input and output filename as command line arguments.

$ ./compress

Decompress a file

In order to decompress data you should run the decompress binary file from the command line. This application uses the file named compressed.dat as the input file and decompressed.dat as the output file. As I said before, I strongly encourage you to modify the code to allow pass an input and output filename from the command line.

$ ./decompress

Please, feel free to submit your Pull Requests. Your contributions are welcome!

Development tutorial

You can watch a technical very detailed video tutorial I made explaining step-by-step all the processes and phases involved during the development of this code. I hope you find it really useful for your learning purposes.