What are compressed and uncompressed files, how does it all work and why compressed files take less storage?
In: Technology
many great answers already, but i throw in how i got it explained when i was young. very simplistic, but here goes:
say you have the text string “aaaaaaaaaabbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb”
10 a’s, 20 b’s.
instead of saving it like that, when compressing, you can write it like “10a20b”
when those 10 a’s and 20 b’s appear multiple times in several locations, you can have the first instance shortened like above, and for the other appearances, you can make an “alias”. l like “string1”. doesn’t make sense in this example because string1 is longer than 10a20b, but if that string was longer, it would save space to use an alias that’s shorter and to refer to they original string
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