Described herein are various embodiments of a coding technique that utilize a stream cipher for switching between first and second coding conventions for encoding a symbol sequence. The first coding convention specifies a first mapping between a symbol and a first codeword and the second coding convention specified a second mapping between the symbol and a second codeword. According to the invention, a key generated by the stream cipher is used to selected one of the first and second coding convention and the mapping of the selected coding convention is then utilized for encoding the symbol.