Described herein relates to a method for pre-processing files that can improve file compression rates of existing general-purpose lossless file compression algorithms, particularly for files on which traditional algorithms perform poorly. The elementary cellular automata (CA) pre-processing technique involves finding an optimal CA state that can be used to transform an original file into a format (i.e., an intermediary file) that is more amenable to compression than the original file format. This technique is applicable to multiple file types and may be used to enhance multiple compression algorithms. Evaluation on generated files, as well as samples selected from online text repositories, finds that the CA pre-processing technique improves compression rates by up to 4% and shows promising results for assisting in compressing data that typically induce worst-case behavior in standard compression algorithms.