Hkattelu / himanZip

A command line file compressor that uses Huffman encoding.

himanZip

A command line file compressor that uses Huffman encoding.

How to use the C version

Start off by downloading the compressor. Once downloaded, make it with gcc. You can then use the binary on any file with read/write permissions. Files will be compressed to type .hzip, and can be decompressed with the same binary by using the -d flag.

Compressing: ./himanZip file.txt Decompressing: ./himanZip -d file.txt.hzip

Setting up the python version

To run the code you may have to first install a python package called bitstring. The purpose of bitstring is simply to allow easier manipulation of bits in python for the encoding and decoding.

You should be able to easily install the package with easy_install bitstring or pip install bitstring

If those don't work, then you can get it here: https://github.com/scott-griffiths/bitstring Just download, unzip, and run python setup.py install

Running the python version

To encode a text file, run

python HuffmanCodec.py --encode filename.txt

This will generate a new file called filename.huff which is simply the encoded file.

To decode the huff file, run

python HuffmanCodec.py --decode filename.huff

This will restore the encoded file and call it filename-decoded.txt.