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and variable-length quantity (VLQ) codes.

For example, the mapping above is not a prefix code because we do not know after reading the bit string whether it encodes an source symbol, or if it is the prefix of the encodings of the or symbols. An example of a prefix code is shown below.

:: Example of encoding and decoding:
::: -> -> ->

For this example, if the probabilities of were , the expected number of bits used to represent a source symbol using the code

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