Byte pair encoding or digram coding is a simple form of data compression in which the most common pair of consecutive bytes of data is replaced with a byte that does not occur within that data. A table of the replacements is required to rebuild the original data. The algorithm was first described publicly by Philip Gage in a February 1994 article "A New Algorithm for Data Compression" in the C Users Journal. A variant of the technique has shown to be useful in several natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as Google's SentencePiece, and OpenAI's GPT-3.