scsu 0.2

Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode

Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode

This package implements SCSU as a Python text codec.

Benefits of Unicode compression

Short strings can be compressed with less overhead than general compression algorithms and with fewer bytes than popular Unicode transformations like UTF-8 or UTF-16:

• ¿Qué es Unicode? ("What is Unicode?" in Spanish) is encoded as 18 bytes in UTF-8, but only 16 bytes in SCSU, the same length when encoded in ISO-8859-1.
• ユニコードとは何か？ ("What is Unicode?" in Japanese) is encoded as 30 bytes in UTF-8, 20 bytes in Shift JIS and EUC-JP, but only 15 bytes in SCSU.
• 𐑢𐑳𐑑 𐑦𐑟 𐑿𐑯𐑦𐑒𐑴𐑛? ("What is Unicode?" in the Shavian alphabet) is encoded as 47 bytes in UTF-8, but only 17 bytes in SCSU.

In an extreme case, SCSU can compress long strings of emoji:

emoji = "".join(chr(0x1F600 + n) for n in range(0x50))
sms_data = emoji.encode("UTF-16BE")  # 320 bytes
scsu_data = emoji.encode("SCSU")  # 83 bytes

Requirements

This package requires Python 3.10 or above.

Usage

Simply import the library and the SCSU codec is ready to use:

import scsu

b = s.encode("SCSU")

To automatically add and remove a byte-order mark signature, use SCSU-SIG instead of SCSU.

Errata

CPython bug #79792 causes the sample code (below) to not flush the encoding buffer:

with open(file, mode="w", encoding="SCSU-SIG") as f:
    f.write(s)  # Never flushes the encoding buffer.

A workaround is to import the codecs module, then replace open with codecs.open:

import codecs

with codecs.open(file, "w", encoding="SCSU-SIG") as f:
    f.write(s)  # Always flushes the encoding buffer.

However, reading an encoded file with the given code will work:

with open(file, mode="r", encoding="SCSU-SIG") as f:
    print(f.read())

Credits

Encoding logic is heavily based on a sample encoder described in "A survey of Unicode compression" by Doug Ewell and originally written by Richard Gillam in his book Unicode Demystified, but with some encoding optimizations:

• A two-character lookahead buffer.
  • This avoids a case where switching from Unicode to single-byte mode requires two window switches.
• Compression of sequential static window characters into a single new dynamic window.
  • This avoids a case where a long string of punctuation is encoded as multiple quoted characters.
• Uses the Latin-1 Supplement window whenever possible.
  • When encoding a string that only contains ASCII and Latin-1 Supplement characters, this results in a string that is both valid in SCSU and ISO-8859-1.

Decoding logic, however, is entirely original.