Example
For example, consider a screen containing plain black text on a solid white background. There will be many long runs of white pixels in the blank space, and many short runs of black pixels within the text. Let us take a hypothetical single scan line, with B representing a black pixel and W representing white:
WWWWWWWWWWWWBWWWWWWWWWWWWBBBWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWBWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
If we apply the run-length encoding (RLE) data compression algorithm to the above hypothetical scan line, we get the following:
12W1B12W3B24W1B14W
This is to be interpreted as twelve Ws, one B, twelve Ws, three Bs, etc.
The run-length code represents the original 67 characters in only 18. Of course, the actual format used for the storage of images is generally binary rather than ASCII characters like this, but the principle remains the same. Even binary data files can be compressed with this method; file format specifications often dictate repeated bytes in files as padding space. However, newer compression methods such as DEFLATE often use LZ77-based algorithms, a generalization of run-length encoding that can take advantage of runs of strings of characters (such as BWWBWWBWWBWW).
Read more about this topic: Run-length Encoding
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“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)