DEFLATE

DEFLATE is a lossless data compression algorithm that uses a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding. It was originally defined by Phil Katz for version 2 of his PKZIP archiving tool, and was later specified in RFC 1951.

Unlike LZW, DEFLATE is free of any patents, and this has led to its use in gzip compressed files and PNG image files, in addition to the zip format for which it was originally designed.

Source code for DEFLATE compression and decompression can be found in zlib, the freely-available, general-purpose compression library.

External Links

• RFC 1951, DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification version 1.3, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951.txt
• zlib Home Page, http://www.zlib.org