Huffman Encoding Project

This project is a deliberate practice exercise to become more familiar with memory-managed languages, specifically using the Zig programming language. The challenge tackled here is implementing a Huffman Encoder/Decoder, an idea inspired by the coding challenge found here.

Requirements

To compile and run this project, you must have Zig installed from the @master branch. You can install Zig by following the instructions from the official Zig website.

Compilation

To compile the project, simply run:

zig build

Usage

Once compiled, the program can be run with the following parameters:

• --input <file.txt>: The input file that contains the data to be encoded.
• --output <myencodeddata>: The output file where the encoded data will be written.
• --tree <huffman_tree_file> (optional): An optional parameter to pass your own text to generate a Huffman tree used for encoding.

Example

./huffman --input file.txt --output encoded_output --tree my_tree.txt

If you omit the --tree parameter, the program will generate its own Huffman tree based on a specific file in the project 135-0.txt.

Learning Objective

The purpose of this project is to practice working with a memory-managed language and to implement a classic compression algorithm from scratch.

Acknowledgments

This project is based on the Huffman encoding challenge found at Coding Challenges.