Abstract: Novel decoding method and apparatus are disclosed for Huffman or variable-length codes. According to the invention, variable-length code-words are divided into two parts, a variable-length prefix part and the remainder of the code-word which is of fixed-length or approximately so. The variable-length part consists of a series of 1's terminated by a single 0 bit. The number of 1's preceeding the first 0 bit indicates the prefix of a particualr code-word. The code-words are arranged so that the ones with the same prefix have the same length, or as close as possible. With this novel codification, decoding the variable-length code-words is accomplished in two simple steps. In the first step the decoder determines the position of the first 0 bit in the present code-word, using this information to specify a section of the main memory. The second step is to index into that memory section using the remaining part of that code-word, and this retrieve the fixed length representation.