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General question about file compression.


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This is just a general question asked out of curiosity about file compression, not actually related to VN's or anything on this site, but given it's technical nature, this still seemed like the right place to ask.

 

I've always been curious about this, but how does file compression actually work? All of those binary bits of 0's and 1's are needed to make a program function. When I extract a set of .rar files, the resultant folder contains more data than the sum of the .rar files. This isn't like with written text read by a human that can recognize the existence of a typo or a dropped word and reason out the correction or what was meant to be there. Computer are anal retentively literal with no flexibility. 0110 is not the same thing as 010 and the computer will have no way of figuring that out. So where does the missing data go, and how does it come back?

Edited by Outpost Omega J
Typo Corrections
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