problems decompressing files

[Robert Eppich]

> I would think encountering 13 identical and contiguous bytes would
> be a very common occurrence


> I think that would depend on the type of data being compressed,
> Tom...I believe the original file in question is a .wav.
>
> As I noted yesterday 20+MB of ASCII text apparently has no such
> contiguous identical byte string issues.


However, if the file was a tab delimited spreadsheet file with 13 or 
more columns and 1 line was completely empty (a common occurrence ), so 
that there where 13 tab characters in a row, decompress would fail. 
Also, if the file was compressed by some other program, lets say a 
vendor's price list, RR 2.X on Mac OSX would have a good chance of 
running into this problem and failing.

I have not tried to create a 20MB file of ascii text. My largest was 
about 5 MB, but If you (Rob) would be willing to try adding a record 
where one field has 13 "X"'s in a row and then Compress and Decompress 
it, I'm pretty sure that you will get the decompress error as well.

Robert Eppich
epsi computer systems, inc.