A simple and ugly (read don't judge me) Huffman compression and decompression written in c++ for the final project of my CS301 algorithms and complexity class.

A ZIP301 file is in two parts: a plaintext header and a binary body.

The first several lines of the header are formatted thus: [binary string] [whitespace] [character]

In the event that the [character] to encode is itself whitespace, we use the following surrogate encodings:

• ' ' <==> 'space'
• '\n' <==> 'newline'
• '\r' <==> 'return'
• '\t' <==> 'tab'

After the binary strings, there is a single line of five asterisks: '*****'

Following the asterisks, there is a single line containing the total number of bits, N, in the encoded document. This is necessary because APIs for reading/writing files do not support granularity smaller than one byte. However, a Huffman encoding for an entire document may not necessarily be a multiple of 8. Hence, the final few bits of the final byte in the encoding may not be significant.

This concludes the header. The body (in binary) begins on the next line. It is simply the contents of the original document, encoded using the codes listed in the file header. In the (likely) event that the encoding is not an exact multiple of 8 bits, the final byte will have some insignificant bits at the end of it.