Abstract: A variable-length prefix/suffix step code is combined with words for high frequency transmission. The words with the code attached are compacted into constant length packets at the transmission end and are successively extracted at the receive end. The code permits the two operations of extraction and decoding to be separated at the receive end; this is essential in high speed applications where these operations cannot be performed simultaneously within one clock cycle. The code also permits the extraction operation to be simplified by considerably reducing the size of the necessary hardware. The efficiency of processing messages with a particular probability distribution (e.g. video signals) is very high (97-98%).