I'd favour putting a count of the number of significant characters in the last byte in the last 2 bits of the that byte. (Which may require a zero last byte.)

The advantage is that it makes comparisions slightly easier...

  1. strings which compress to the same number of bytes can be compared directly.

  2. strings which compress to different numbers of bytes can be compared directly up to the last byte of the shorter. If that doesn't settle the matter, then you need to use the last bits of the shorter to select a mask...

In reply to Re^2: Unpack Fail to Decompress String? by gone2015
in thread Unpack Fail to Decompress String? by neversaint

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