An implementation of Elias coding for input-restricted channels is presented and analyzed. This is a variable-to-fixed length coding method that uses finite-precision arithmetic and can work at rates arbitrarily close to channel capacity as the precision is increased. The method offers a favorable tradeoff between complexity and coding efficiency. For example, in experiments with the 12, 7] runlength constrained channel, a coding efficiency of 0.9977 is observed, which is significantly better than what is achievable by other known methods of comparable complexity. © 1990 IEEE