A computer implemented method, computer program product, and system for decompressing compressed data. The system (400) has an interface component (420) configured to access and read a compressed data set (310) encoded with a LZW based compression algorithm. The compressed data set (310) includes a sequence of elements including byte characters (B) and symbols (S1/S2), each symbol corresponding to an encoded subset of the data set, and each symbol having a first portion (S1) including a previous symbol or a byte character and having a second portion (S2) including a byte character. The system further has a decoder (410) configured to generate a decompressed data set (320) by applying a LZW based decompression algorithm to the compressed data set (310) The decoder (410) makes use of a reverse order stack (440) configured for intermediate storage of byte characters decoded by the decoder (410) from the compressed data set (310). In one embodiment the system further has a dictionary which can store the full content values of symbols.