With increasing amount of text data being stored rapidly, efficient information retrieval and Storage in the compressed domain has become a major concern. Compression is the process of coding that will effectively reduce the total number of bits needed to represent certain information. Data compression has been one of the critical enabling technologies for the ongoing digital multimedia revolution. There are lots of data compression algorithms which are available to compress files of different formats. This paper provides a survey of different basic lossless data compression algorithms on English text files: LZW, Huffman, Fixed-length code (FLC), and Huffman after using Fixed-length code (HFLC). All the above algorithms are evaluated and tested on different text files of different sizes. To find the best algorithm among above, comparison is made in terms of compression: Size, Ratio, Time (Speed), and Entropy. The paper is concluded by the decision showing which algorithm performs best over text data.