Huffbit

Huffbit is a command-line program written in Go that implements Huffman coding for data compression

About

• Huffman code is a type of optimal prefix code that supports lossless data compression by assigning variable length codes to the characters of a file.
• Most frequent characters are given a shorter code, while comparatively larger codes are given to uncommon characters, thus reducing file size optimally.
• This is done by counting all the characters in a file, then constructing a Huffman Tree for assigning values to them.
• These codes are then written bit by bit to the output file.

Features

• Implements the classic Huffman coding algorithm.
• Supports compression and decompression of byte data.
• Leverages Go's standard library packages for efficient file handling and data structures.

Usage

Requirements:

The Go programming language installed on your system.

Installation:

git clone https://github.com/ary82/huffbit.git && cd huffbit

Build:

go build -o ./bin/

or using make,

make build

This will create an executable in the bin directory. (Optionally add this file to your path)

Use:

# Compress a file
./bin/huffbit -c /your/txt/file
# Decompress a file
./bin/huffbit -d /your/txt/file.huffbit

or if you've added the executable to your path,

# Compress a file
huffbit -c /your/txt/file
# Decompress a file
huffbit -d /your/txt/file.huffbit

Working

Let's take the input string "huffbit":

This program makes the following huffman tree:

The Codes for the characters will be generated as:

Character	Code
f	00
i	010
t	011
b	100
h	101
newline	110
u	111

After Writing the necessary headers, the encoded characters will be written to the output file:

After compression, we can see the bytes needed get reduced from 8 in "huffbit\n" to just 3 in the compressed file, making it a theoretical compression of 62%