Intermediate C Programming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 27Huffman Compression

DOI: 10.1201/9781003257981-27

Section 20.5 introduced binary trees through the example of binary search trees. This chapter describes another way to use binary trees in a popular compression method called Huffman Compression or Huffman Coding. Huffman Coding was developed by David Huffman in the early 1950s. After several decades, the method is still widely used as one of the best compression algorithms.

27.1 Variable-Length Coding

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a fixed-length representation using 8 bits for each letter, even though some letters (such as e and s) are more common than some others (such as q and z). In contrast, Huffman Compression uses variable-length representations. ...