Block merging for off-line compression

To bound memory consumption, most compression systems provide a facility that controls the amount of data that may be processed at once—usually as a block size, but sometimes as a direct megabyte limit. In this work we consider the Re-Pair mechanism of Larsson and Moffat (2000), which processes large messages as disjoint blocks to limit memory consumption. We show that the blocks emitted by Re-Pair can be postprocessed to yield further savings, and describe techniques that allow files of 500 MB or more to be compressed in a holistic manner using less than that much main memory. The block merging process we describe has the additional advantage of allowing new text to be appended to the end of the compressed file.