Huffman

This program compresses files with Huffman encoding, completed May 19, 2015 for program 4, ECS 60 at UC Davis

Assignment:

This was the first challenge program of ECS 060, Data Structures and Programming at the University of California, Davis. Program 4 Assignment

Considered Alternatives:

Originally, Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression was considered for this project. However before long, LZW compression took too long, and an alternative had to be used. Therefore, we implemented Huffman encoding.

How it works:

• The main portion of the program reads in a file as a char array. It then finds how many time each character (from 0 to 256) was used
• It then creates a min-heap of "Trees", removing each node and replacing the combined node into the heap. When the heap has only one item, the tree has finished building
• It reads the Tree as well as the 8-numRemainderBits into the first portion of output.
• Finally, it compresses the message using the Huffman tree, and converts the 1's and 0's to binary with bitshifts