Huffman Coding Project

Introductory note

This project was the final exam of the Data Structure discipline, taught by Professor Márcio Ribeiro, of the Computer Engineering course at the Federal University of Alagoas (Brazil) in 2018.

The aim was to make good use of learned data structures. Our group used the C language for the program, Huffman tree depth test, unit test cases for all data structs with CUnit, plot in R and a seminar about Btree.

The Huffman Algorithm to compress files

The algorithm consists of compressing a file by mapping the repetition of bytes. For easy understanding, think that if "11111111" is the group of bytes with the highest file repetition, "renaming it" would compress the file.

AAAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBBCCCDD

The size of this sequencial txt file is 24 bytes and 14 bytes after compression.

For this, the algorithm uses hashtable to calculate repetitions, heap to sort and a binary tree for map them.