Right. Also transmitting the table is inefficient as well (although there is always adaptive huffman encoding, which i never got around to implementing). But you may find LZW Demystified and RFC: Compress::LZW interesting. :-)

Actually in my experiments my implementation is more efficient than straight LZW because it doesnt lose bits by packing things into words. But that also means its not binary compatible which makes it more or less useless.