Highly-compressable data with long run lengths

[ivan-tkatchev]

Examples being VT100 escape codes from a terminal or images in PPM format. Such data is highly compressable, with 20x compression rate or more. In some codecs this kind of data will cause strange behavior and trigger edge cases.

Here is an example file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5gzk7ro4ze7v3xw/testimage.ppm?dl=0

(Just a screencap from a terminal emulator on my machine, nothing that could have licensing issues.)

[ivan-tkatchev]

P.S. This file triggers strange behavior in gzip -- gzip results in a compressed file that's 3.5 times larger than when compressed with bzip2. This has practical implications: after converting the PPM to PNG the file is almost twice as big as when converted to GIF; this really should never happen. (PNG uses deflate under the hood.)