HuffmanCompressor

A program that can losslessly compress and decompress files using Huffman Encoding

Working

Compression

1. Find frequencies of characters and generate a Huffman Tree
2. Traverse, and assign bitcodes to each character, and store in map
3. Using this info, create a bitstring of the input file
4. Read this bitstring in chunks of 8, using OR and SHIFT operations to get the byte
5. Write these bytes to file

Decompression

1. Generate bitstring of compressed file
2. Go through each bit, comparing with the huffman codes, and appending characters to a vector on match
3. Write this vector to the file, which would be our uncompressed version

Efficiency

Since we're now storing the table in the compressed file to decouple the compression and decompression phases, the size of our compressed file has increased. So for smaller files, it is actually worse to compress them, since we have to store the table information too. But as file size increases, so does our efficiency, to some extent.

Case in point:

1. Uncompressed: 4 bytes

2. Compressed: 128 bytes

3. Uncompressed: 1100KB

4. Compressed: 550KB

As we can see, with a higher file size, we have a higher probability of better compression.

Issues

1. There's a bug in which if you have equal frequencies, it doesn't work properly(FIXED)

2. In the implementation, we're appending zeroes to make the bitstring length a multiple of 8. Due to this, during the decompression phase, some unwanted characters are added(At most 7). This can be fixed by storing the amount we padded in the file.

3. It is quite slow. I'm sure there's a better way than having to muck around in converting to bitstrings over and over again.

To Do

1. Make it faster
2. Find way to store codes efficiently

1. Store the padded amount in the file

2. Store the table in the file header so that we don't need to depend externally

3. Fix the same frequency bug