Compression

Implementing a Huffman Tree is a fun afternoon project for anyone interested in learning about data compression. A Huffman Tree is a type of binary tree that sees use in the compression of an arbitrary data file. Developing a command line utility to compress/decompress a file using Huffman coding is a good CS101 challenge. Breaking It Down Into Steps This project starts where many do: Wikipedia. The Huffman Coding wiki article gives a nice breakdown with examples of the data structure and associated algorithms. In particular, the “Basic Technique” section covers the algorithms for compression and decompression. You need three key data structures to implement the big Compress() and Decompress() routines: ...