02 Run Length Encoding

Lesson PowerPoint

Lesson Activities

Exam Question

A charitable organisation is trying to make the works of William Shakespeare available to more people.

The organisation decides to make a copy of Shakespeare’s entire works available as a downloadable text file from its website. It further decides to compress the file before making it available to download.

• State an advantage to the website’s visitors of the file being compressed. (1) 
• Explain why the company should use lossless and not lossy compression. (3)
• The organisation looks at using either run length encoding or dictionary encoding to compress the file described in part (a).
  
  Discuss the two compression methods and justify which you would recommend. You may refer to the extract of text below to illustrate your argument. [12]

  • What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

    By any other name would smell as sweet;

    So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,