> What do you mean by a "proper way"? If size is what you care about, just compress your data. Compression will do a lot better for a much wider range of data t

> What do you mean by a "proper way"? If size is what you care about, just compress your data. Compression will do a lot better for a much wider range of data than some clever encoding will. That's precisely what I meant. Simple variable-length compression.