On the structure of some group codes (Q1188327)

An infix code is a variable length code \(C\) over the alphabet \(A\) such that \[ y_ 0 x_ 1\cdots x_ k y_ k\in C\Longrightarrow y_ 0\cdots y_ k=1 \] for every \(x_ 1,\dots,x_ k\in C\) and \(y_ 0,\dots,y_ k\in A^*\). Outfix codes are defined in a similar way. A group code denotes here a variable length code for which the syntactic method of the language \(C^*\) is a group. The main contributions of this article are characterizations of group codes when \(C\) is a semaphore, infix or outfix code.