A variable length decoder (200) detects the class of a codeword in a bit stream (332). If the codeword is first class, a first set of encoding rules are used to generate a pointer “C A B” into a table to retrieve table content (250), where the values of “C”, “A”, and “B” are determined from the codeword. If the codeword is second class, a second set of encoding rules are used to generate a pointer “0 (C+X) Z” into a table to retrieve table contents (252), where the values of “C” and “Z” are determined from the codeword and the value of “X” is a predetermined value. The code length of each codeword is calculated while the pointer is being generated, and thus the code length does not have to be stored in memory (204).