Patent ID: 8643515

Claim:
A method for compressing a data stream, the method comprising: transforming, with a transformation front end block of a data compressor, a data stream into a transformed data stream of referencing symbols and other data elements, the referencing symbols representing a data sequence in the data stream which is identical to a data sequence in a reference data block and being pointers to the identical data sequence in the reference data block; and encoding, with an encoding end block of the data compressor, the referencing symbols by replacing them with codewords according to an encoding scheme; wherein the transformed stream includes at least one control symbol indicating a change between a portion of the transformed data stream containing a sequence of the other data elements and a portion of the transformed data stream containing a sequence of the codewords for the referencing symbols, wherein the location of the control symbol within the transformed data stream defines the end of the respective portion of the transformed data stream; and wherein the encoding scheme provides that at least one codeword associated to one of the referencing symbols is longer than a codeword representing the control symbol.