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5 Format of the LZMA stream in lzip files

The LZMA algorithm has three parameters, called "special LZMA properties", to adjust it for some kinds of binary data. These parameters are; ‘literal_context_bits’ (with a default value of 3), ‘literal_pos_state_bits’ (with a default value of 0), and ‘pos_state_bits’ (with a default value of 2). As a general purpose compressor, lzip only uses the default values for these parameters.

Lzip also finishes the LZMA stream with an "End Of Stream" marker (the distance-length pair 0xFFFFFFFFU, 2), which in conjunction with the "member size" field in the member trailer allows the verification of stream integrity. The LZMA stream in lzip files always has these two features (default properties and EOS marker) and is referred to in this document as LZMA-302eos or LZMA-lzip.

The second stage of LZMA is a range encoder that uses a different probability model for each type of symbol; distances, lengths, literal bytes, etc. Range encoding conceptually encodes all the symbols of the message into one number. Unlike Huffman coding, which assigns to each symbol a bit-pattern and concatenates all the bit-patterns together, range encoding can compress one symbol to less than one bit. Therefore the compressed data produced by a range encoder can’t be split in pieces that could be individually described.

It seems that the only way of describing the LZMA-302eos stream is describing the algorithm that decodes it. And given the many details about the range decoder that need to be described accurately, the source code of a real decoder seems the only appropiate reference to use.

What follows is a description of the decoding algorithm for LZMA-302eos streams using as reference the source code of "lzd", an educational decompressor for lzip files which can be downloaded from the lzip download directory. The source code of lzd is included in appendix A. Reference source code



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