Prefix code: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:33, 8 April 2006

Revision as of 20:32, 6 May 2006

Line 1:

== Introduction ==

{{cleanup-date|November 2005}}

A '''prefix code''' is a [[code]] which meets the "prefix property", which is that no code word is a [[Prefix (linguistics)|prefix]] of any other code word in the set. A code which uses code words {0,10,11} meets the prefix property; a code whose set is {0,1,10,11} does not because "1" is a prefix of both "10" and "11".

Line 8:

Examples of prefix codes are the variable-length [[Huffman coding|Huffman codes]], [[country calling codes]], [[ISBN]]s and the Secondary Synchronization Codes used in the [[UMTS]] [[W-CDMA]] 3G Wireless Standard.

''This article is partly derived from [[Federal Standard 1037C]], which uses the term '''comma-free code'''.''

----

'''prefix codes''' are a form of [[entropy encoding]] used in [[lossless data compression]].