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views:

29

answers:

1
Q: 

Why is the concatenation of a set of files greater than the sum of the parts?

In an obscure way, it is a programming question. I concatenated several sets of text files in the range of 1MB and found that in each case the concatenated file size was much larger than the sum of the individual files by a large extent (2x-4x times more, even greater for Windows7).

Why is this?

+2  A: 

IT was probably read in ASCII, and written in Unicode. Open the file in a binary/hex viewer to confirm.

leppie  2010-06-23 12:39:37

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