Entropy Visualizer

What's this? (Upload a file. Extension and type don't matter. Then click "Submit")

What's this?

This tool counts the number of times a symbol is found in a file. (Currently, it only looks at byte symbols, i.e. byte values from 0 to 255). The purpose of this is to illustrate how a side effect of most compression algorythms is that one symbol, or group of symbols, is not biased, or found more frequently in a file. Below are some examples:

Examples

Declartion of Independance

Notice how you see LOTS of a-z and A-Z and no binary, this is how text files always look.

Declartion of Independance - Zip

Declartion of Independance - GZip

Mpeg

PDF

This image as a bitmap

(Notice how the image is mostly black, and so you get LOTS of 0's (almost 600,000 bytes of zero's). 0 is the default byte value for a black pixel in an 8 bit bitmap.