Zero suppression
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zero suppression is the removal of redundant zeroes from a number. This can be done for storage, page or display space constraints or formatting reasons, such as making a letter more legible.
Examples:
- 00049823 - 49823
- 7.678600000 - 7.6786
- 0032.3231000 - 32.3231
| It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into sparse array. (Discuss) |
It is also a way to store a large array of numbers, where many of the entries are zero. By omitting the zeroes, and instead storing the indices along with the values of the non-zero items, less space may be used in total. It only makes sense if the extra space used for storing the indices (on average) is smaller than the space saved by not storing the zeroes.
Example:
- Original array: 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 5, 0, 0, 0, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
- Pairs of index and data: {2,1}, {5,2}, {6,5}, {10,4}

