This algorithm is particularly well-suited for compressing sorted data, e.g., a list of words from a dictionary.
Incremental encoding is widely used in information retrieval to compress the lexicons used in search indexes; these list all the words found in all the documents and a pointer for each one to a list of locations.
[1] As one example, incremental encoding is used as a starting point by the GNU locate utility, in an index of filenames and directories.
The GNU locate utility further uses bigram encoding to further shorten popular filepath prefixes.
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