Run-length encoding (RLE) replaces consecutive repeated characters in data with a single character and count. For example, "aaabbc" would compress to "3a2bc". RLE works best on data with many repetitive characters like spaces. It has limitations for natural language text which contains few repetitions longer than doubles. Variants include digram encoding which compresses common letter pairs, and differencing which encodes differences between successive values like temperatures instead of absolute values.
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