It's the opposite: It's almost never used on bytes, because that just doesn't give you a lot of compression.
It is generally used as the final stage of some other compression algorithm, and operates on symbols generated by that algorithm. Often, this is some variation on LZ77, and the symbols are something like "bytes 0-255" in addition to various symbols that denote a match in previous data of some length and at some offset.
It is generally used as the final stage of some other compression algorithm, and operates on symbols generated by that algorithm. Often, this is some variation on LZ77, and the symbols are something like "bytes 0-255" in addition to various symbols that denote a match in previous data of some length and at some offset.