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Huffman Coding

About The Project​

This program was a college assignment to implement huffman coding. Huffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm. This program takes in text files as input (the file names are currently hardcoded). The main program files is called Huffman.java. It has the ability to both compress files and then decode those compressed files. The compress function also returns the length of the data encoded so you can see how much was compressed. This program runs pretty fast as well. I compressed the bible and it was nearly instant on my machine. It is not a visually stunning program, but lossless data compression is a really fascinating topic. Unfortunately, there are not really any example images of the program to show because it basically just compresses your data in a non-readable format (i.e. not much to look at). You can read more about huffman coding here.

Main program functions​

/**
* Compress file using Huffman code. 
* @param inputFile  The original data file
* @param outputFile  The compressed data file that should be generated. 
* @return the length of the data encoded with Huffman Code, don't include data for the prefix tree and length of the original file. 
*/
public int compress(String inputFile, String outputFile);

/**
* Decode the compressed data file back to the original data file. 
* @param inputFile : the compressed file
* @param outputFile : the file that should be generated by the decode function using ascii code. 
*/
public void decode(String inputFile, String outputFile);