how to get pairs from ZLIB compressor

Question

I am compressing several long strings using ZLIB, which uses LZ77 representations of repeated substrings prior to encoding these representations using a Huffman tree. I am interested in studying the sequence of integer tuple representations themselves, and have been looking in the code to figure out where these are generated and how I could print them out one after another. Unfortunately, I am not very strong in C, and it seems that the compressor handles distances as pointers, and not as ints. Could somebody please tell me if there is a simple way to print out the sequence of tuples as the algorithm runs, and point me to the appropriate location in the code.

Answer 1

You can use infgen to disassemble a deflate stream. It will print the decoded symbols in a readable form, e.g. match 41 105 indicating a string to copy of length 41, from a distance back of 105.