Compression

Stream compression formats
A stream format takes a stream of bytes, and outputs a different, hopefully smaller, stream of bytes. These compression formats are often used internally in other data structures to compress data, as well as in network protocols, such as http. Used stand-alone, a stream compression format does not offer archiving capability, however in the UNIX doctrine, an archiver like tar can be combined with an archive format to produce a proper compressed archive.

Compression in general
(including specific implementations used in multiple formats)


 * Arithmetic coding
 * DEFLATE
 * Huffman coding
 * Lempel-Ziv
 * LZ4
 * LZ77
 * LZ78
 * LZMA
 * LZMA2
 * LZSS (Lempel–Ziv–Storer–Szymanski)
 * LZW
 * Run-length encoding
 * zlib

Specific file formats/programs

 * 7z
 * 9CDR (Amiga FileImploder Clone)
 * BARF (.x, .x??)
 * bzip (.bz)
 * bzip2 (.bz2)
 * compress (.Z)
 * CrLZH (.?y?)
 * CRN (.crn) - compressed text files used for PC-Write manual
 * Crunch (.?z?)
 * DiskDoubler
 * DUPA (Amiga FileImploder Clone)
 * Error Code Modeler (.ecm)
 * File Imploder (Amiga) (.imp)
 * Freeze/Melt (Unix) (.F)
 * gzip (.gz)
 * Inflate (.infl) - parody format that actually increases size
 * JCalG1 (.jc, Commodore Amiga)
 * Lzip (.lz)
 * LZMA_Alone (.lzma)
 * lzop (.lzo)
 * LZX
 * MS-DOS installation compression (.??_)
 * pack (.z)
 * RK (WinRK)
 * Softdisk Text Compressor (.ctx)
 * Squash - single file compression on RISC OS
 * Squeeze/SQ (.?q?)
 * tzip
 * Tzip (Text ZIP)
 * XZ (.xz)