Huffman Compression in C

This is an implementation of a huffman code compression algorithm in C.

A background on what Huffman coding envolves is available on Wikipedia.

Guide to use

You can build the huffman encoder and decoder binaries with

make

To compress a file simply use:

./huffman file_to_compress compressed_file

And to decompress you can use:

./unhuffman compressed_file uncompressed_file

or

./huffman -u compressed_file uncompressed_file

Further options

It is possible to get some compression statistics using the -s option

./huffman -s file_to_compress compressed_file

It is also possible to take input from stdin, which is defined as the filename -

./huffman - compressed_file <file_to_compress

or to output to stdout

./huffman file_to_compress | ./unhuffman -c - > uncompressed_file

Here we see that if we leave off the output file with huffman the output is assumed to be stdout. To be explicit that you want to output to stdout you can use the option -c.