PackBits Compression in Go

Overview

This package provides an implementation of the PackBits compression scheme for Go. The PackBits compression scheme is a simple lossless run-length encoding scheme. It originally appeared as the compression scheme used by MacPaint on Macintosh computers in 1984.

References

• Apple Technical Note TN1023

• Wikipedia: PackBits

Example of Usage

// Compress raw data.
data := []byte{
    0xAA, 0xAA, 0xAA, 0x80, 0x00, 0x2A, 0xAA, 0xAA,
    0xAA, 0xAA, 0x80, 0x00, 0x2A, 0x22, 0xAA, 0xAA,
    0xAA, 0xAA, 0xAA, 0xAA, 0xAA, 0xAA, 0xAA, 0xAA,
}
packed := packbits.Pack(data)

// Decompress packed data.
unpacked, err := packbits.Unpack(packed)

Efficiency

There is more than one way to encode a given block of raw data. I believe that this library will always choose one of the smallest possible encodings. In certain circumstances, this means merging adjancent blocks of data into a single block.

License

PackBits is distributed under the terms of the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE.txt for details.