Deflate

Deflate is a compression procedure primarily combining two algorithms together. On the one hand a dictionary based algorithm equivalent to LZ77 is used to encode recurring sequences. On the other hand a Huffman code is applied for entropy coding.

The procedure was introduced together with the ZIP data format. Responsible for development and license free publication is Phil Katz, the inventor of ZIP and founder of PKWARE, inc.

The specification of the deflate procedure is published in RFC 1951: "DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification" (by P. Deutsch). This document does not describe Deflate as an internet standard, it is only intended for information purposes.

Deflate is applied in context with different data formats, e.g.:

7z (7-Zip)

GZIP

ZIP