At 08:14 PM 11/14/2000 -0700, David Berg wrote:

>There's an easy change to RLE encoding that would increase compression
>substantially for long string values.
>
>Use 0 to 128 to mean the character value.
>Use -2 to -128 to mean a repeat count followed by a character.
>Use -1 to mean that the next two bytes are a repeat count followed by a
>character.

Yes, that's the algorithm I had in mind (or that had slipped my
mind when I wrote the message) and as you said, -1 is never used.

Great,

Ann