The Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT, also called block-sorting compression), is an algorithm used in data compression techniques such as bzip2. It was invented by Michael Burrows and David Wheeler.

When a character string is transformed by the BWT, none of its characters change value. The transformation permutes the order of the characters. If the original string had several substrings that occurred often, then the transformed string will have several places where a single character is repeated multiple times in a row. This is useful for compression, since it tends to be easy to compress a string that has runs of repeated characters by techniques such as move-to-front transform and run-length encoding.

For example, the string:

SIX.MIXED.PIXIES.SIFT.SIXTY.PIXIE.DUST.BOXES

could be transformed into this string, which is easier to compress because it has many repeated characters:

 TEXYDST.E.IXIXIXXSSMPPS.B..E.S.EUSFXDIIOIIIT

Now the Burrows-Wheeler algorithm works as follows:

• Given an input string S, eg: "abcba".
• Find all rotations of S.
  

  eg: "abcba", "bcbaa", "cbaab", "baabc", "aabcb"
  

• Now sort the strings hence produced.

  eg: "aabcb", "abcba", "baabc", "bcbaa", "cbaab"
  

• Arrange the strings in a len(S) x len(S) grid.

  aabcb
  abcba
  baabc
  bcbaa
  cbaab
  

• Output the row number (1-based indexing) containing the original input string. Also output the strings formed by characters in the last column.
  eg: 2 bacab

2
bacab
3
rwlb
11
baaabaaaabbbaba
0

abcba
rbwl
baaabbbbaaaaaab