Editing Unary coding (section)

== Canonical unary codes ==
{{See also|Canonical Huffman code}}
For unary values where the maximum is known, one can use canonical unary codes that are of a somewhat numerical nature and different from character based codes. The largest ''n'' numerical '0' or '-1' ( <math>\operatorname2^{n} - 1\,</math>) and the maximum number of digits then for each step reducing the number of digits by one and increasing/decreasing the result by numerical '1'.{{Clarify|date=May 2025|reason=(1) Poor grammar. (2) Are canonical codes only for the positive natural number convention? (3) Shouldn't this say that we are starting with the largest n for this 0 or 2^(n-1) code?  (4) Why use red to write the final code (in this example corresponding to n=10)? Does it belong or not belong to the canonical format?  (6) Why is there an extra row after the n=10 row? (Shouldn't we delete that empty row to indicate that there are no more codes after the maximum?) (7) Is the maximum code corresponding to n=10 or n=9, which this table both uses 9 digits to express. (We should delete this n=10 row if is beyond the maximum...the algorithm part about "reducing the number of digits by one" would only make sense if 9 is the maximum.)}}  
{| class="wikitable"
! n  !!  Unary code 
!Alternative
|-
| 1 ||  1 
|0
|-
| 2 ||  01 
|10
|-
| 3 || 001 
|110
|-
| 4 ||  0001 
|1110
|-
| 5 ||  00001 
|11110
|-
| 6 ||  000001 
|111110
|-
| 7 ||  0000001 
|1111110
|-
| 8 ||  00000001 
|11111110
|-
| 9 ||  000000001 
|111111110
|- style="color: red;"
| 10 ||  000000000 
|111111111
|-
| colspan="3" |
|}
Canonical codes can [http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cap5015/Huff.pdf require less processing time to decode]{{Clarification|reason=Citation deals with [[Canonical Huffman code]]. Is the statement relevant only for when dealing with [[Huffman encoding]], or is this a general statement about Canonical unary code?|date=May 2025}} when they are processed as numbers not a string. If the number of codes required per symbol length is different to 1, i.e. there are more non-unary codes of some length required, those would be achieved by increasing/decreasing the values numerically without reducing the length in that case.