Abstract: A method and system for compressing and decompressing data is provided. In preferred embodiments, a computer system compresses a data buffer comprising a plurality of symbols wherein each symbol has one or more occurrences. The system generates a symbol table containing each symbol and having a corresponding index. For each occurrence of the symbol in the data buffer, the system determines the index for that symbol into the symbol table, and encodes the index into a variable-length portion, a delimiter, and a fixed-length portion. The system then outputs the encoding as the compressed data buffer.