Comparison of Methods for Text Compression

One of the purposes of this research was to introduce several well-known text compression methods and to test them in order to compare their performances, not only with each other, but also with results from various previous researches. Welch's implementation of the Ziv-Lempel method was found to outperform any other single method introduced in this thesis, or any combination of methods. One other purpose of this research was to calculate the average distance from any one bit to the next synchronization point in static Huffman decoding, following a decoding error. The average distance in words decoded was predicted to be the average length of a codeword in bits, and tests on resynchronization showed that this was a good prediction.Computing and Information Scienc