LZF-compress is a Java library for encoding and decoding data in LZF format, written by Tatu Saloranta ([email protected])

Data format and algorithm based on original LZF library by Marc A Lehmann. See LZF Format for full description.

Format differs slightly from some other adaptations, such as the one used by H2 database project (by Thomas Mueller); although internal block compression structure is the same, block identifiers differ. This package uses the original LZF identifiers to be 100% compatible with existing command-line lzf tool(s).

LZF alfgorithm itself is optimized for speed, with somewhat more modest compression. Compared to the standard Deflate (algorithm gzip uses) LZF can be 5-6 times as fast to compress, and twice as fast to decompress. Compression rate is lower since no Huffman-encoding is used after lempel-ziv substring elimintation.

See Wiki for more details; here's a "TL;DNR" version.

Both compression and decompression can be done either by streaming approach:

InputStream in = new LZFInputStream(new FileInputStream("data.lzf"));
OutputStream out = new LZFOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("results.lzf"));
InputStream compIn = new LZFCompressingInputStream(new FileInputStream("stuff.txt"));

or by block operation:

byte[] compressed = LZFEncoder.encode(uncompressedData);
byte[] uncompressed = LZFDecoder.decode(compressedData);

and you can even use the LZF jar as a command-line tool (it has manifest that points to 'com.ning.compress.lzf.LZF' as the class having main() method to call), like so:

java -jar compress-lzf-1.0.3.jar

(which will display necessary usage arguments for -c(ompressing) or -d(ecompressing) files.

Besides Java support, LZF codecs / bindings exist for non-JVM languages as well:

• C: liblzf (the original LZF package!)
• C#: C# LZF
• Go: Golly
• Javascript(!): freecode LZF (or via SourceForge)
• Perl: Compress::LZF
• Python: Python-LZF
• Ruby: glebtv/lzf, LZF/Ruby

Check out jvm-compress-benchmark for comparison of space- and time-efficiency of this LZF implementation, relative other available Java-accessible compression libraries.

Project Wiki.

LZF belongs to a family of compression codecs called "simple Lempel-Ziv" codecs. Since LZ compression is also the first part of deflate compression (which is used, along with simple framing, for gzip), it can be viewed as "first-part of gzip" (second part being Huffman-encoding of compressed content).

There are many other codecs in this category, most notable (and competitive being)

• Snappy
• LZ4

all of which have very similar compression ratios (due to same underlying algorithm, differences coming from slight encoding variations, and efficiency differences in back-reference matching), and similar performance profiles regarding ratio of compression vs uncompression speeds.