LZP: a new data compression algorithm

The LZP algorithm is a new technique which combines PPM-style context modeling and LZ77-style string matching. The result is fast, efficient, and memory-use conservative. The LZP method turns out to be very similar to Shannon´s (1958) first theoretical context-coder, and also to the BlockSort coder. The LZP parsing is based on the fact that the most recent preceding context (of a given order) is an excellent predictor for the following data. LZP finds the most recent occurrence of the current context and compares the string following that context to the current input. The length of match between the two strings is found and then coded. If the length of match is zero, a literal (single non-matched byte) is written using another method (such as lower-order LZP, or PPM). Four LZP implementations were studied in detail