As I said, a good & small interview question is this one, it is a good one because it is short, relatively simple to handle, but it should show a lot of things about your code. To start with, being faced with a non trivial task that most people are not that familiar with.

Implement a Decompress(Stream input, Stream output, byte[][] dictionary) routine for the following protocol:

Prefix byte – composed of the highest bit + 7 bits len

If the highest bit is not set, this is a uncompressed data, copy the next len from the input to the output.

If the highest bit is set, this is compressed data, the next byte will be the index in the dictionary, copy len bytes from that dictionary entry to the output.

I couldn’t resist doing this myself, and I came up with the following:

public void Decompress(Stream input, Stream output, byte[][] dictionary)
{
    var tmp = new byte[128];
    while (true)
    {
        var readByte = input.ReadByte();
        if (readByte == -1)
            break;
            
        var prefix = (byte) readByte;
        var compressed = (prefix & 0x80) != 0;
        var len = prefix & 0x7f;

        if (compressed == false)
        {
            while (len > 0)
            {
                var read = input.Read(tmp, 0, len);
                if(read == 0)
                    throw new InvalidDataException("Not enough data to read from compressed input stream");
                len -= read;
                output.Write(tmp, 0, read);
            }
        }
        else
        {
            readByte = input.ReadByte();
            if(readByte == -1)
                throw new InvalidDataException("Not enough data to read from compressed input stream");
            output.Write(dictionary[readByte], 0, len);
        }
    }
}

Things to pay attention to: Low memory allocations, error handling, and handling of partial reads from the stream.

But that is just part of the question. After reading the protocol, and implementing it. The question now turns to what does the protocol says about this kind of compression scheme. The use of just 7 bits to store len drastically limit the compression utility in a general format. It also requires an external dictionary, which most compression formats don’t use, they use the actual compressed text itself as the dictionary.  Of course, I’ve been reading compression algorithms for a while now, so that isn’t that fair. But I would expect people to note that that 7 bit limits the compression usability.

And hopefully, with a bit of a hint, they should note that the external dictionary is useful for small data sets where the repetitions are actually between entry, not per entry.