manzip

• manzip is a file comrpession program that I've been working on to learn about file compression algorithms.

• This program only works with text files written in english and is ASCII text. Something like "صباح الخير" will most likely not get encoded, or something wierd will happen.

• This is liscensed under MIT Liscense, I am not responsible for any damages to your data or system.

• The program can be downloaded as Windows executable (.exe) on the releases tab of this github page. If you want a binary for a different OS like Linux or MacOS you will need to compile this on your own machine.

Under-The-Hood

The way this program encodes/decodes files is through run-length-encoding. This means that sometimes file sizes might actually increase when encoded ("abcd" turns into "a1b1c1d1" when encoded). RLE works best when there is a lot of repetition (i.e: "aaabbbcccddd" turns into "a3b3c3d3" when encoded)

The code

main.c: This is the entry point of the program and is the CLI, it takes 3 arguments representing the input/output file and encoding/decoding. It handles misinputs and errors. It requires manzip.h to work manzip.h: This is where the RLE algorithm is implemented, it has encoding/decoding functions for both files and strings. You can inlude this header file into your own projects too, it only depends on the standard library

How to compile (C99)

 gcc -o manzip -I./headers main.c

How to use

Usage is also very simple, the program just needs 3 parameters

• input file ("myFile.ext")

• output file ("myEncodedFile.ext")

• mode ("E" or "D")

• Example usage (Encoding)

./manzip input.txt output.txt E

• Example usage (Decoding)

./manzip encoded.txt decoded.txt D