Huffman and Prefix-Codes

This repository contains both the source code for the page The (Complete?) Guide to Huffman and Prefix Codes and its companion example implementations.

Those example implementations start from the easiest one and each incrementally improves upon the previous one:

1. Straightforward Huffman encoding and decoding
2. Use the canonical representation to reduce header size and decode faster
3. Build the Huffman tree with linear time complexity
4. Compute code lengths faster by avoiding to recurse the Huffman tree
5. Limit lengths with a simple algorithm
6. Limit lengths with a smart algorithm

Note: the code is this repository was written so as to remain as legible as possible, it is not meant to be the most optimized implementation around

Licensing

The code in this repository is licensed under the zlib license, as follows:

Copyright © 2024, Romain Bailly

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:

1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.
2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.
3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.