📦 RLE Compressor / Decompressor (C)

A simple Run-Length Encoding (RLE) tool written in C that can compress and decompress data using standard input/output.

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🧠 What it does

This program performs:

🔹 Compression

Converts repeated characters into:

(character, count)

Example:

AAABBBCC → A3B3C2

But internally stored as binary pairs:

A 3 B 3 C 2

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🔹 Decompression

Reconstructs original text from encoded format.

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⚙️ Features

• Simple RLE compression
• Fast character-based processing
• Works with stdin/stdout (pipes supported)
• Lightweight C implementation

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📂 Files

rle.c        → main source code
README.md    → documentation

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🚀 Compilation

Use GCC to compile:

gcc rle.c -o rle

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▶️ Usage

🔹 Compress

./rle compress < input.txt > output.bin

🔹 Decompress

./rle decompress < output.bin > output.txt

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🧾 How it works

Compression logic:

• Reads characters one by one

• Counts consecutive repeating characters

• Outputs:

  character + count
  

Decompression logic:

• Reads pairs:

  character, count
  

• Repeats character count times

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⚠️ Limitations

• Works only with binary-safe input (no formatting guarantees for text view)
• Not efficient for non-repetitive data

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📌 Example

Input:

AAAAABBBCCDAA

Compressed output (binary form):

A 5 B 3 C 2 D 1 A 2

Decompressed output:

AAAAABBBCCDAA

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🧠 Concepts used

• Run-Length Encoding (RLE)
• Character stream processing
• Standard I/O in C
• Command-line arguments

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👨‍💻 Author

0x7byte

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📈 Future improvements

• File-based compression (fopen/fwrite version)
• Support for larger counts (>255)
• Combine with Huffman or LZ77 for better compression
• Add header format for safer decoding