Huffman Compressor

Huffman Coding Compressor built in C. It’s a neat tool to shrink text files by giving shorter codes to frequent characters. Think of it as a digital zipper for your files—lossless.

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What’s This About?

Huffman Coding is a classic algorithm that compresses data by assigning variable-length codes based on how often each character appears. More frequent = shorter code. This project lets you:

• Compress any file into a smaller binary version.
• Decompress it back to the original, bit for bit.

Perfect for text files with lots of repeating patterns!

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How It Works

Here’s the flow (Compression and Decompression) , visualized with a quick graph:

- Compression:

graph TD
    A[Input File] --> B[Count Frequencies]
    B --> C[Build Huffman Tree]
    C --> D[Generate Codes]
    D --> E[Bit-Packing]
    E --> F[Write Compressed File]

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Example

# Compress text.txt → compressed.huff
Operation: c
Input: text.txt
Output: compressed.huff

- Decompression:

graph TD
    A[Compressed File] --> B[Read Header]
    B --> C[Rebuild Tree]
    C --> D[Decode Bits]
    D --> E[Write Original File]

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Example

# Decompress compressed.huff → output.txt
Operation: d
Input: compressed.huff
Output: output.txt

How to Use

1. Compile using gcc compiler

gcc huffman.c -o huffman

2. Run the Program

./huffman

3. Follow Prompts

• c = Compress | d = Decompress

• Enter input file (must exist)

• Enter output file (directory writable)

  Outputs

  Sample Outputs [https://tanishx1.github.io/web-result/file%20compression/index.html]