The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 08, 1997
Filed:
May. 04, 1995
Steven J Watts, San Jose, CA (US);
Balakrishna R Iyer, San Jose, CA (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
The present invention provides a system and method for the dictionary ordering of keys after expansion, compression and concatenation of their key parts. After each key part has been expanded through padding, each substring of identical characters of length greater than or equal to three is compressed through run-length encoding algorithm. The substring is replaced by the sequence character, a compression identifying character and a number identifying the number of characters being replaced. After compression and the subsequent concatenation, the keys are compared character by character. At the first instance of a miscomparison, the comparison scheme performs a normal dictionary ordering if neither of the characters are part of a compression sequence. If a character at the point of miscomparison is part of a compression sequence then an ordering decision is made based on the compression character, the length of the compressed substring and the character following the compressed substring.