Manually Decoding GZIP: A Deep Dive into the Deflate Algorithm

The author attempts to manually decode the string "TOBEORNOTTOBEORTOBEORNOT" compressed with GZIP, providing a deep dive into the Deflate algorithm. The article details the GZIP data structure, including magic numbers, compression methods, timestamps, and other fields. It focuses on the core of Deflate compression—the LZ77 algorithm. LZ77 uses characters and copy commands (length and distance) for encoding, effectively reducing data size. By manually parsing the compressed data, the author reconstructs the original string step-by-step. The conclusion: bit encoding is more efficient than byte encoding for data compression, but manual decoding is complex.