variable-width encoding
nounUK /ˈveəriəbl wɪdθ ɪnˈkəʊdɪŋ/
US /ˈveriəbl wɪdθ ɪnˈkoʊdɪŋ/
A way for a computer to store letters where some letters take up more space than others.
The text file uses variable-width encoding, so common letters take less space than rare ones.
RELATED WORDS
OTHER MEANINGS
2. A character encoding scheme in which different symbols are represented by different numbers of bytes.
UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding that uses one to four bytes per character.
3. A data storage method where each item's size depends on its value rather than being fixed.
The database uses variable-width encoding to save disk space on short strings.
4. A compression-friendly approach to representing text where frequent characters get shorter codes.
Switching to variable-width encoding reduced the file size significantly.