Variable-length code
Code which maps information to a variable number of bits / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Variable-length code?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
In coding theory, a variable-length code is a code which maps source symbols to a variable number of bits. The equivalent concept in computer science is bit string.
Variable-length codes can allow sources to be compressed and decompressed with zero error (lossless data compression) and still be read back symbol by symbol. With the right coding strategy an independent and identically-distributed source may be compressed almost arbitrarily close to its entropy. This is in contrast to fixed-length coding methods, for which data compression is only possible for large blocks of data, and any compression beyond the logarithm of the total number of possibilities comes with a finite (though perhaps arbitrarily small) probability of failure.
Some examples of well-known variable-length coding strategies are Huffman coding, Lempel–Ziv coding, arithmetic coding, and context-adaptive variable-length coding.