A novel algorithm for text compression is developed which consists of
two parts. In the first part the text sample is encoded by the Ziv-Lem
pel asymptotic structured codebook. In the second part decoding is car
ried out by a novel rule based (RB) algorithm which improves the compr
ession ratio for a given text sample by up to 50% when compared to the
full text search as required by the Ziv-Lempel decoding algorithm.