How Do You Compress Data Using Huffman Encoding?
• Begin with a forest of trees. All trees are one node, with the weight of the tree equal to the weight of the character in the node. Characters that occur most frequently have the highest weights. Characters that occur least frequently have the smallest weights. • Repeat this step until there is only one tree: • Choose two trees with the smallest weights, call these trees T1 and T2. Create a new tree whose root has a weight equal to the sum of the weights T1 + T2 and whose left subtree is T1 and whose right subtree is T2. The single tree left after the previous step is an optimal encoding tree.
