Abstract: Over the last decade the amount of textual information available in electronic form has exploded. It is estimated that text data currently comprises nearly half of all Internet traffic, but as of yet, no lossless compression standard for text has been proposed.
A number of lossless text compression algorithms exist, however, none of these methods is able to consistently reach its theoretical best-case compression ratio.
This paper evaluates the performance characteristics of several popular compression algorithms and explores two strategies for improving ratios without significantly impacting computation time.