Description
Huffman Coding
Huffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm. The idea is to assign variablelength codes to input characters; lengths of the assigned codes are based on the
frequencies of corresponding characters. The most frequent character gets the smallest
code and the least frequent character gets the largest code.
The variable-length codes assigned to input characters are Prefix Codes, means the codes
(bit sequences) are assigned in such a way that the code assigned to one character is not
prefix of code assigned to any other character. This is how Huffman Coding makes sure
that there is no ambiguity when decoding the generated bit stream.
In this project, you will be using a priority queue and a binary tree of your design to
implement a file compression/uncompression algorithm called “Huffman Coding”.
Your program will read any file and compress it using your implementation of the
Huffman coding algorithm found in the explanation. The compressed data will be written
to a file. That compressed file will be then be read back by your program and
uncompressed. The uncompressed file will then be written to a third file. The
uncompressed file should of course match the original text file.
Summary of Processing
• Read the specified file and count the frequency of all characters in the file.
• Create the Huffman coding tree based on the frequencies.
• Create the table of encodings for each character from the Huffman coding tree.
• Encode the file and output the encoded/compressed file.
• Read the encoded/compressed file you just created, decode it and output the
decoded file.
