Compressor

This program implements a simple text compressor using the Huffman coding algorithm.

HowTo

1: Calculate the frequency of each string.

• 2: Sort all the characters on the basis of their frequency in ascending order.
• 3: Mark each unique character as a leaf node.
• 4: Create a new internal node.
• 5: The frequency of the new node as the sum of the single leaf node
• 6: Mark the first node as this left child and another node as the right child of the recently created node.
• 7: Repeat all the steps from step-2 to step-6.

• License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
• Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huffman_huff_demo.gif

Usage

To compress a text file:

./compressor [input_file] -comp [output_file]

To decompress a compressed file:

./compressor [input_file] -decomp [output_file]

Example:

To compress a file named input.txt and save the compressed output as compressed.bin

./compressor input.txt -comp compressed

To decompress a file named compressed.bin and save the decompressed output as restored.txt:

./compressor compressed.bin -decomp restored.txt

Note:

The input file must be a text file. The compressed output will have a .bin extension. The decompressed output will be saved without any extension.