Huffman coding

This repository contains a C++ implementation of Huffman encoding and decoding algorithms. Huffman coding is a popular technique for lossless data compression. It assigns variable-length codes to different characters, with shorter codes for more frequently occurring characters. This leads to efficient encoding for commonly used characters, resulting in compression.

Here's a simple example to illustrate the Huffman coding process:

Suppose we have the input data "ABBCCCDDDD". The frequency table would be:

Character	Frequency
A	1
B	2
C	3
D	4

Following the algorithm described above, we construct the Huffman tree

     (10)
    /   \
 (4)D   (6)
       /   \
    (3)C   (3)
         /   \
      (1)A   (2)B

and assign the following Huffman codes:

Character	Frequency
A	0
B	10
C	110
D	111

This is a simplified example, but it demonstrates the basic structure and steps involved in Huffman coding. Keep in mind that in real-world scenarios, more complex data structures and algorithms may be used for efficiency and optimization.

Usage

clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/amandeepsirohi/Huffman_Encoding_Decoding.git --depth=1

Building

g++ huffman_main.cpp encode_text.cpp -o huff-encode

Test on random text file

create text file with 500000 lines of random strings

cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-z0-9' | fold -w 32 | head -n 500000 > input.txt

compress input.txt file

huff-encode input.txt out.txt

compare size

du -h input.txt
16M    input.txt

du -h out.txt
11M    out.txt

decompress file

build decoder

g++ huffman_main.cpp decode_text.cpp -o huff-decode

decompress out.txt file

huff-encode compressed.huff out.txt

amandeepsirohi / Huffman_Encoding_Decoding