Huffman encoding, particularly from a packed data format, is simplified by using two different table formats depending on code length. Huffman tables are also reduced in size thereby. Decoding is performed in reduced time by testing for the length of valid Huffman codes in a compressed data stream and using an offset corresponding to a test criterion yielding a particular test result to provide a direct index into Huffman table symbol values while greatly reducing the size of look-up tables used for such a purpose.