Huffman Encoding

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encode compresses a file using the Huffman coding algorithm. decode will decode compressed files created by encode.

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Build Targets

• make all

Builds encode, decode, error, and entropy.

• make encode

Builds the encode program

• make decode

Builds the decode program

• make entropy

Builds the entropy program

• make clean

Removes object and binary files

• make format

Formats the source files using clang-format

• make scan-build

Analyzes the program for bugs

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Running

./encode [-h] [-v] [-i infile] [-o outfile]

./decode [-h] [-v] [-i infile] [-o outfile]

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Command Line arguments:

For the encode program:

• -h: Program usage and help.
• -v: Print compression statistics
• -i infile: Input file to compress (default: stdin).
• -o outfile: Output of compressed data (default: stdout).

For the decode program:

• -h: Program usage and help.
• -v: Print compression statistics
• -i infile: Input file to decompress (default: stdin).
• -o outfile: Output of decompressed data(default: stdout).

Bugs

Running scan-build warns of a potential memory leak from infile_name and outfile_name, but these strings are freed and their pointers are set to NULL when they are no longer needed and every time the program prematurely exits on error.

It also warns that the value stored to 'bytes' is never read, but this variable assignment is necessary to for the read_bytes function to update the external variable used to keep track of the total file size.

It also warns of potential derencing of null points while traversing the Huffman tree, but it is traversed in such a way that this cannnot happen.