1. Setup
2. Features
3. File Reading
4. Assignment for This Part

Setup

Let's start off with a basic setup, which includes a nice directory structure and a neat Makefile. What are you looking at me for? Alright, here is my setup:

huffman/                        # Root directory
├── dec/                        # Source for decoder
├── enc/                        # Source for encoder
├── obj/                        # Object files
└── texts/                      # Test files for encoding
    └── t8.shakespeare.txt      # Shakespeare :)
├── Makefile
├── README.md

Pretty straight-forward. Just make it easier for yourself.

Features

Here are some user stories for the project:

• the user can compress ASCII files into Huffman binaries
• the user can decompress Huffman binaries into ASCII files
• the user can compress and decompress files of large sizes (not unlimited)
• the compression and decompression process should be reasonably quick
• compression and decompression is split into 2 binary executables

File Reading

You know that that's one of the prerequisites, right? Here is the gist of it.

#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main() {
    ifstream ifile("infile.txt");

    if (ifile.good()) {
        char tmp;
        while (ifile.read(&tmp, 1)) {
            // Do something
        }
    }

    ifile.close();
    return 0;
}

Disclaimer: The above code is just a snippet, and is not guaranteed to work.

Assignment for This Part

• set up the file/directory structure for the project
• set up appropriate Makefile/CMakeLists.txt/AutoTools/Command Line Kung Fu
• set up the bare-bones, starting with the main function
• set up the skeleton so that the project compiles

(:star: denotes a challenging task. :star2: denotes an even more challenging task.)