frooxius

Lossy Text Compression (FrooxArchive #10)

Added 2022-08-18 21:09:57 +0000 UTC

Hello everyone and welcome to another FrooxArchive post!

First, sorry for not posting one of those in the past two weeks. I ended up getting quite busy with certain things and my schedule got a bit out of whack. I can’t share much on what I’ve been working on just yet and it will probably keep me busy for a while, but I’ve got a small project from 2011 to share with you this time.

Today’s project from my past that I want to show you started with a simple question: “Can you write an 8 letter word with 7 letters?”. The answer turns out to be “Yes, but why on Earth would you?”.

This project, which I dubbed “Lossy Text Compression” is quite simple in principle - it takes in input text and outputs text as a result, that’s a little bit shorter than the input… and also no longer human readable.

It takes the input text, strips pretty much all punctuation and symbols and converts it to lowercase. Then uses an expanded symbol set to represent the output - symbols, uppercase and lowercase letters.

This way, each letter in the output text squeezes an extra bit of information, at the cost of losing “detail” in the input text (like punctuation and case). It’s not useful for anything, because traditional compression will compress way better than this and not lose you any data in the process, but it’s one of those projects that you do just because you can.

If you’d like to poke around it a bit, I’ve put up the source code at GitHub here:

https://github.com/Frooxius/Lossy-Text-Compression

Anyway, thank everyone for reading this far! Hope you’ve been doing well and sorry again that I haven’t posted in a bit! I’ll try to bring you some of my older games next and record a bit of a video for each to show it off with some commentary too, but it’ll take a bit of time to setup!

And last, I leave you with this:

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