Huffman code

This is a Huffman code compression tool. Any text in the input will be profiled for generating an optimum variable-length prefix-free code, then compressed into bytes using that code.

Source Code Output

The compression statistics include the description of the Huffman tree itself. The tree here is represented as a preorder traversal, with the internal node symbol defaulting to ~ (thus ~a~bc stands for encoding a, b, c as 0, 10, and 11 respectively). This encoding is 2N-1 characters for an alphabet of size N, as there are always N-1 internal nodes in the tree.

The first four bytes of the output are a length header, which ensures that overhang bits are discarded while decoding.