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 ABC - Advanced Blocksorting Compressor


Current Version:
ABC V2.4

ABC is a free data compression program based on the Burrows-Wheeler transformation. The source code is free for academic, research and educational use as depicted in the
Abel Public License (APL).
The program is developed in OBJECT PASCAL (DELPHI), since the author prefers the structure of PASCAL over C/C++. The program is a command line program just like GZIP. It is not an archiver program but compresses each file file separatly. It´s intention is to compress files and get average compression rates and compression/decompression times for a single file or a corpus.
The sorting buffer size is 5 MB.

ABC reaches an average compression ratio for the Calgary Corpus of 2.238 bps.

 Supported Operating Systems


Currently ABC supports only 32 bit WINDOWS systems:

WINDOWS 95/98/NT/2000/XP

 Usage


The usage of ABC is very similar to GZIP:

abc.exe [-hcev1] [input filename/wildcard] [output extension]
  -h : print help message
  -c : compress files
  -e : expand files
  -v : verbose
  -1 : fast

If no output extension is given:
 "abc" is default for compression
 "exp" is default for expansion

Examples:
  abc.exe -c1 autoexec.bat abc
  abc.exe -e autoexec.abc bat
  abc.exe -cv *.exe        abc

 Current Versions


Logo

Title

Description

 

Version
 

2.4
 

 

Date
 

24.04.2003
 

 

Description
 

A strong BWT implementation with 5 MB sorting buffer size for large files.
For files larger or equal than 256 KB ABC 2 uses the following stages:
 BWT - RLE_EXP - SIF - AC,
for files smaller than 256 KB ABC 2 uses a different scheme:
 BWT - RLE_BIT0 - AWFC - RLE_BIT1 - AC.
More details can be found at the paper "
Improvements to the Burrows-Wheeler Compression Algorithm: After BWT Stages".
 

 

Results for the Calgary Corpus
 

Average Compression Rate for the Calgary Corpus: 2.238 bps
Compression speed about half as fast as GZIP -9 and BZIP2.
 

Executable ABC 2.4

Executable
 

The executable file for WINDOWS.

Source ABC 2.4

Source
 

The source code is written in OBJECT PASCAL (DELPHI) with several optimization in assembler (can be turned of for pure PASCAL code) and is published under the Abel Public License (APL).
 

 

 

 

 

 

Version
 

1.3
 

 

Date
 

24.04.2003
 

 

Description
 

A fast BWT implementation with 5 MB sorting buffer size. Mainly build on an MTF stage and a fast sorting stage. It uses the scheme:
 BWT - RLE_EXP - MTF - AC.
 

 

Results for the Calgary Corpus
 

Average Compression Rate for the Calgary Corpus: 2.341 bps.
Compression speed about 5% faster than GZIP -9 and 2% faster than BZIP2.
 

Executable ABC 1.3

Executable
 

The executable file for WINDOWS.

Source ABC 1.3

Source
 

The source code is written in OBJECT PASCAL (DELPHI) with several optimization in assembler (can be turned of for pure PASCAL code) and is published under the Abel Public License (APL).
 


 Version History


Version

Description

Version 2.4
 

24.04.2003
Small bug fixes (No file found, Buffersize = 0).
Released Source Code.
 

Version 1.3
 

24.04.2003
Small bug fixes (No file found, Buffersize = 0), removed parts not needed.
Released Source Code.
 

Version 2.3
 

08.12.2002
Fixed problem with highest exponent, found by Uwe Herklotz.
 

Version 1.2
 

08.12.2002
Fixed problem with highest exponent, found by Uwe Herklotz.
 

Version 2.2
 

06.12.2002
Fixed problem, if output file name equals input file name (found by Yaakov Gringeler).
Fixed problem with initializing sorting stage, which occurs very rarly (found by Uwe Herklotz).
 

Version 1.1
 

06.12.2002
Set sorting buffer size to 5 MB.
Fixed problem, if output file name equals input file name (found by Yaakov Gringeler).
Fixed problem with initializing sorting stage, which occurs very rarly (found by Uwe Herklotz).
 

Version 2.1
 

05.12.2002
Set sorting buffer size to 5 MB.
 

Version 2.0
 

23.11.2002
A strong BWT implementation with 1 MB sorting buffer size.
 

Version 1.0
 

22.11.2002
First ABC version.
A fast BWT implementation with 1 MB sorting buffer size.
Mainly build on an MTF stage and a fast sorting stage.
 

 

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