compressing short strings?

[Paul Rubin]

"inhahe" <inhahe at gmail.com> writes:
> i don't see anybody mentioning huffman encoding.  i think it just works per 
> byte, so it's not as tight as gzip or whatever.  but it sounds like it would 
> be easy to implement and wouldn't require any corpus-wide compression 
> information. except a character frequency count if you wanted to be optimal.

In principle you could do it over digraphs but I tried that once and
it didn't help much.  Basially -because- it doesn't use any
corpus-wide compression information, it doesn't compress anywhere near
as well as LZ, DMC, or whatever.