Huffman Text Compression Algorithm

The Huffman algorithm is the most efficient single-text compression for text.

How Computers Compress Text: Huffman Coding and Huffman Trees - YouTube

• Proven to be most efficient for single-character compression
• Uses a complete binary tree to store data
• Is a optimization problem.

Example of Huffman Tree.

• Number indicates summed frequency
• 0: left, 1: right
  • 0010 encodes n
  • 111 encodes (blank)
• ⇒ The more frequent the letter, the shorter the encoding is
• No encoding is a prefix of any other tree (each letter is encoded by different number of bits)