Deflate and gzip stream format - More details

Question

I am working on an fpga implementation of deflate or gzip decompressor. I need to understand first the format of the compressed data stream before i could do some coding.

I read documentations but I always see about the huffman coding and reading in the trees,

I want to know how the tree exist inside the data stream ie. in gzip { HEADERS, etc etc etc, COMPRESSED PAYLOAD, CRC/ISIZE FOOTER } It doesn't tell me how to or what the COMPRESSED payload looks like.

If deflate, there's a 3bit HEADER for each block, but how long is a block or how do i know if it's another block?

After this I think the documents are enough to help me do the algorithm but I can't understand what exactly I'm handling/touching.

Answer 1

The "compressed payload" is documented in RFC 1951, which describes in detail the deflate format. Read that, a few times, and then you can come back here if you have any actual, specific questions.