This program is about Compression and specifically run length encoding - a theory topic in GCSE.
Run length encoding recognises runs of the same symbol (or colour in an image) and replaces the individual symbols with a number of consecutive symbols and one copy of the symbol itself.
In the example above from the specification for this program you can see that in the data the letter "a" is there twice consecutively followed by one "d" and six "8" etc.
The line of compressed data is below - 02a - representing two consecutive "a" characters followed by 01d for one "d" character etc. - Don;t forget the spaces after the six "8" characters.
You have two text files to work with one contains an asciiArt image and the other contains the compressed RLE code that makes it up.
The above picture is the one you have to work with - you can see it is made up of several different characters and quite a lot of spaces.