deflateKompression

Deflate compression, commonly referred to as deflate, is a lossless data compression algorithm that combines LZ77-style string matching with Huffman coding. It was designed by Phil Katz for PKZIP in the early 1990s and is specified in RFC 1951. Deflate is widely used in formats and protocols such as gzip, ZIP archives, PNG images, and HTTP content encoding.

The algorithm operates in two stages. First, it performs LZ77-style matching with a 32-kilobyte sliding window to replace repeated sequences with length/distance pairs or literal bytes. This stage produces a stream of literals and length/distance tokens. In the second stage, these tokens are encoded with Huffman codes. Deflate supports blocks that can be stored with no compression, or compressed with either fixed Huffman codes or dynamically generated Huffman codes. Each block has a flag indicating whether it is the last block in the stream.

Wrappers and compatibility: The core deflate method is defined in RFC 1951, but real-world usage often occurs inside wrappers such as the zlib format (which adds headers and an Adler-32 checksum) or the gzip format (which adds a header, CRC-32, and a footer). Some libraries also expose a deflateRaw variant that omits wrappers. Deflate is the underlying compression method behind many widely deployed technologies.

Applications and characteristics: Deflate provides a good balance between compression ratio and speed for general-purpose data, especially text and programs with repeating patterns. It is less effective for already compressed data and does not provide encryption. Implementations are widely available and optimized in many programming environments.