DEFLATE Algorithm

Deflate, stylized as DEFLATE and also called Flate, is a lossless data-compression algorithm that combines LZ77 with Huffman coding, designed by Phil Katz for version 2 of his PKZIP archiving tool and later specified in RFC 1951 in 1996. Katz also designed the original algorithm used to construct Deflate streams and received a software patent for it, but an algorithm producing valid Deflate output was widely believed to be implementable without infringing that patent, a belief that helped drive Deflate's widespread adoption in the zlib data format, the gzip file format, the PNG image format, and the ZIP file format for which Katz originally designed it; the patent has since expired.