could be thought of as only needing to return int(L/LR) + (1 if L mod LR ≠ 0) times to the start of that single buffered run unit, read LR characters (or maybe fewer on the last return), and repeat until a total of L characters are read. But mirroring the encoding process, since the pattern is repetitive, the read pointer need only trail in sync with the write pointer by a fixed distance equal to the run length LR until L characters have been copied to output in total. Considering the above, especially if the compression of data runs is expected to predominate, the window search should begin at the end of the window and proceed backwards, since run patterns, if they exist, will be found first and allow the search to terminate, absolutely if the current maximal matching sequence length is met, or judiciously, if a sufficient length is met, and finally for the simple possibility that the data is more recent and may correlate better with the next input. Pseudocode The pseudocode is a reproduction of the LZ77 compression algorithm sliding window. while input is not empty do match := longest repeated occurrence of input that begins in window if match exists then d := distance to start of match l := length of match c := char following match in input else d := 0 l := 0 c := first char of input end if output (d, l, c) discard l + 1 chars from front of window s := pop l + 1 chars from front of input append s to back of window repeat Implementations Even though all LZ77 algorithms work by definition on the same basic principle, they can vary widely in how they encode their compressed data to vary the numerical ranges of a length–distance pair, alter the number of bits consumed for a length–distance pair, and distinguish their length–distance pairs from literals (raw data encoded as itself, rather than as part of a length–distance pair). A few examples: The algorithm illustrated in Lempel and Ziv's original 1977 article outputs all its data three values at a time: the length and distance of the longest match found in the buffer, and the literal that followed that match. If two successive characters in the input stream could be encoded only as literals, the length of the length–distance pair would be 0. LZSS