RFC - 1950

ZLIB Compressed Data Format Specification version 3.3

Original:	ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1950.txt
Authors:	P. Deutsch [Aladdin Enterprises], J-L. Gailly [Info-ZIP]
Date:	May 1996
Category:	Informational

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Referred by:	19 RFC
Refers to:	0 RFC

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Status

This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 1996 L. Peter Deutsch and Jean-Loup Gailly

Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document for any purpose and without charge, including translations into other languages and incorporation into compilations, provided that the copyright notice and this notice are preserved, and that any substantive changes or deletions from the original are clearly marked.

IESG Note

The IESG takes no position on the validity of any Intellectual Property Rights statements contained in this document.

Abstract

A pointer to the latest version of this and related documentation in HTML format can be found at the URL <ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/png/documents/zlib/zdoc-index.html>.

This specification defines a lossless compressed data format. The data can be produced or consumed, even for an arbitrarily long sequentially presented input data stream, using only an a priori bounded amount of intermediate storage. The format presently uses the DEFLATE compression method but can be easily extended to use other compression methods. It can be implemented readily in a manner not covered by patents. This specification also defines the ADLER-32 checksum (an extension and improvement of the Fletcher checksum), used for detection of data corruption, and provides an algorithm for computing it.

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