Huffman coding is a popular algorithm used for lossless data compression. It assigns variable-length codes to characters based on their frequencies in the input data, allowing more frequent characters to be represented with shorter codes, thereby reducing the overall size of the encoded data.
Huffman coding is effective for data compression due to the following reasons:
- Optimal Prefix Codes: It generates prefix codes (where no code is a prefix of another) that are optimal in terms of minimizing the average code length.
- Efficient Compression: By assigning shorter codes to more frequent characters, Huffman coding achieves efficient compression of data.
- Lossless Compression: It ensures that the original data can be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data, making it suitable for applications where data integrity is critical.
To use this Huffman coding implementation:
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Ensure you have Python installed on your system.
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Clone this repository:
git clone https://github.com/your-username/huffman-coding.git cd huffman-coding -
Run the implementation script implementation.py and provide the path of the file you want to compress:
python implementation.py /path/to/your/file.txt
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The compressed output will be saved in the same directory with a .compressed extension.