compression

A process that encodes information in a way that minimizes the number of resulting code symbols and thus reduces storage space or transmission time.

Tutorial: A data compression algorithm may be "lossless", i.e., retain all information that was encoded in the data, so that decompression can recover all the information; or an algorithm may be "lossy". Text usually needs to be compressed losslessly, but images are often compressed with lossy schemes.

Not all schemes that encode information losslessly for machine processing are efficient in terms of minimizing the number of output bits. For example, ASCII encoding is lossless, but ASCII data can often be losslessly reencoded in fewer bits with other schemes. These more efficient schemes take advantage of some sort of inherent imbalance, redundancy, or repetition in the data, such as by replacing a character string in which all characters are the same by a shorter string consisting of only the single character and a character count.

Lossless compression schemes cannot effectively reduce the number of bits in cipher text produced by a strong encryption algorithm, because the cipher text is essentially a pseudorandom bit string that does not contain patterns susceptible to reencoding. Therefore, protocols that offer both encryption and compression services (e.g., SSL) need to perform the compression operation before the encryption operation.