A CHARACTER COMPRESSION AND DECOMPRESSION DEVICE CAPABLE OF HANDLING A PLURALITY OF DIFFERENT LANGUAGES IN A SINGLE TEXT.

A compressing apparatus separates a data string inputted from source data of a Unicode in which different languages mixedly exist into a language string of each language and, after that, compresses the data string every language string. When decompressing, each language string is decompressed from the compressed data of every different language and the original data string in which a plurality of kinds of language codes mixedly exist is decompressed by using language change information obtained upon compression. In case of special language source data, for example, Japanese source data, the compression and decompression are separately executed for every different byte construction. The compression and decompression are also separately executed for every character kind in the code. Further, the compression and decompression can be also performed by unifying the byte construction.