In theory, yes. In practice, no. At my previous job, I wrote a short Python script that took /usr/dict/words and gzipped it and also converted to UTF-16LE (in

In theory, yes. In practice, no. At my previous job, I wrote a short Python script that took /usr/dict/words and gzipped it and also converted to UTF-16LE (inserting a null byte before every character) and gzipping that. The information content is the same, but the compressed UTF-16LE ends up a bit bigger. IIRC, the difference was more than 1%, but less than 20%. My use case was to show the flaw in the logic a colleague was using to assert that gzipped JSON should be the same size as gzipped MessagePack for the same data, because the information content was the same. It was a quick 5-minute script without having to deal with coming up with a suitable JSON corpus to convert to MessagePack. Among other things, the zlib compression window only holds half as many characters if your characters are twice as big.