7 Bit RLE

Originally for coding of pure text files 7 bit codes were used. According to the ASCII character code all English letters and most of the punctuators were coded within a range from 0 to 127. The range of values from 128 to 255 remained unused. The most significant bit had to be left free e.g. due to the conception of traditional email systems.

From this a special coding scheme was developed using this redundancy. Values below 128 were interpreted as uncoded text and all values larger or equal 128 as counters for the character following.

7 Bit Coding Scheme:

Example:

uncoded  b   c   d   d   d   d   d   e
ASCII   98  99 100 100 100 100 100 101  (decimal)
coded   98  99 131 100             101  (decimal)

Nowadays this procedure has no practical meaning anymore because it refers to a data type, that is no longer relevant.

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