"Size matters" -- Gavin Belson

Quick start

This program would compress any plain text file (.txt extension) into a binary file (.bin) using Huffman algorithm. This helps to save space on your computer. If you don't have python or pip on your computer. On terminal, type

brew install python

This would automatically install python and pip for you.

To use, first install the bitstring python package. On terminal, type

$ pip install bitstring

Then, fetch the program to your computer $ git clone https://github.com/vlongle/HuffmanCompression.git

Then, navigate to the python folder of the program,

$ cd HuffmanCompression
$ cd python

Next, launch the app.

$ python main.py

You will see two options.

Options: 
1. Compress Huffman (hit 1)
2. Decompress Huffman (hit 2)

If you want to compress a file, hit 1 on the keyboard and you'll be prompted to provide the path to your text's file.

Enter the txt file's path:

Enter the path and wait for the algorithm to complete. You'll receive a bin file and a .pickle that contains necessary information for decompression.

If you want to decompress a file, hit 1 on the keyboard and you'll be prompted to provide the path to your bin's file.

Enter the bin file's path:

Then provide the pickle file.

Enter the path to the pickle file (serialization of tree node):

Wait for the algorithm to complete and you'll receive back the decompressed text file.

Huffman Compression

Written in C++ and Python for Create Project CS Principle (ST. Anthony 18')

Basic of the Algorithm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding

Videos (MIT CS 6004, near the end of the lecture)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvfifZsmpQ4

Concepts

Huffman Algorithm
- Heap
- Priority Queue
- Huffman Tree
Data handling
- Byte reading
- Bitwise manipulation
- UTF-8 & ASCII
- Serialization, Pickle module
Web interface
- Django module for Python
- Regex (Regular Expression)

Python Bugs

Can we write to bin file bit by bit? According to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17536411/write-individual-bits-to-a-file-in-python we can't

But 001110 can be treated the same as 1110, which should not happen, if we convert them into int.

http://bhrigu.me/blog/2017/01/17/huffman-coding-python-implementation/

Regular expression

A way to match a special sequence of words.

For example, /d searches for all digit in a file. /d{3} searches for 3-digit numbers in a file. [ ] is a character class which is a way to say OR.

For example, instead of writing /d, we can write [0-9] to mean any digit from 0 to 9 (a.k.a 0 OR 1 OR 2... OR 9)

vlongle / HuffmanCompression