Comma-free code
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
A comma-free code is block code in which no concatenation of two code words contains a valid code word that overlaps both.<ref name="Society1958">Template:Cite journal</ref>
Comma-free codes are also known as self-synchronizing block codes<ref name="KnuthChristmasLecture">Template:Cite AV media</ref> because no synchronization is required to find the beginning of a code word.
In the literature, the requirement that all code words have to have the same length is sometimes dropped, resulting in the same class as self-synchronizing codes, see Self-synchronizing code.
See also
- Self-synchronizing code
- UTF-8, a comma-free character encoding