What is the lempel-Ziv encoding?

Lempel-Ziv encoding is a lossless data compression algorithm that builds a dictionary of substrings from the input data. It works by replacing repeated occurrences of data with references to a single copy stored in the dictionary. The algorithm has several variations, including LZ77 and LZ78, which differ in how they manage the dictionary and encode the data. This technique is widely used in formats like ZIP and GIF for efficient data storage and transmission.