Huffman Tutorial Part 5
If you have arrived at this point, it is assumed that you have slaved through the parts previous to this one in the series. You may have spent a lot of time - ranging from a week to half a month - on this (rather large) endeavor. And if you have made it through, :confetti_ball: CONGRATULATIONS :confetti_ball:! Good work. Now, here is a way to test that your encoder works: by decoding it!
Quick Run-Down of How it Works
Should be rather straightforward:
- Read the binary
- Take up the header information
- Using the header information, (re)construct the Huffman tree
- Using the Huffman tree, construct a map mapping the binary digits to a character
- Using said map, iterate through the leftover binary data, and write the characters to stream (whether it be output or file)
- Close the streams
Because of DRY principles, you
should reuse the code you wrote in your Huffman compression program (in
C/C++'s case, use #include or something - try to avoid copying and
pasting). This goes for (most likely) steps #3-4.
Testing
Should also be quite self-explanatory: you want to see if your Huffman compressor/decompresser works, you run a plain-text file through the compressor, producing a binary file. You run said binary file through the decompresser, producing a plain-text file. You then proceed to check if the plain-text file you produced is the same with the original file.
valgrind is your friend.
Assignment for This Part
- :star: create Huffman decompresser with code reuse
- :star: finish Huffman compressor/decompresser
(:star: denotes a challenging task. :star2: denotes an even more challenging task.)
Final Words
Wasn't that fun? This project teaches you about the applications of binary trees, the recursion that comes with it, and a little bit of bit manipulation.
For some reason, I like it. In fact, I like doing things that involve (low-level) bit manipulations (like Huffman and Chip-8 emulators). Ha, the only thing I seem to dislike about it is when I found out about endianness - the differences between big and little endian. Some systems (like mine) used little endian, meaning that some data-types (such as words) are stored with the least significant byte in the smallest address:
Original Data: 0xABCDEF
LITTLE ENDIAN
-------------
Address: 0000 | 0001 | 0002
Data: EF | CD | AB
BIG ENDIAN
----------
Address: 0000 | 0001 | 0002
Data: AB | CD | EF
Hmmm... this sounds interesting. It is something that I know about, that I have a little experience in. Looks like an idea for the next tutorial/walkthrough....
Anyways, I hope you had as much fun making this project as I did! Hopefully, your teacher would award you properly, or, if not applicable, you would reward yourself with a nice healthy burst of dopamine. ~Niiiiiicce.