June 2020
Intermediate to advanced
382 pages
11h 39m
English
Content preview from 40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know
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Huffman coding
Huffman coding is one of the oldest methods of compressing data and is based on creating a Huffman tree, which is used to both encode and decode data. Huffman coding can represent data content in a more compact form by exploiting the fact that some data (for instance certain characters of the alphabet) appears more frequently in a data stream. By using encodings of different length (shorter for the most frequent characters and longer for the least frequent ones), the data consumes less space.
Now, let's learn a few terminologies related to Huffman coding:
Coding: Coding in the context of data represents the method of representing data from one form to another. We would like the resultant form to be concise.
Codeword: