A Compressor in C++

A compressor/decompressor using Huffman coding

How It Works

The compressor follows the following steps:

• Read the input file(s)
• Generate frequencies of each character
• Generate a huffman tree from the frequencies
• Write huffman tree to output file
• Read input file(s) again
• Get corresponding bits from huffman tree
• Write bits to output file

The decompressor works in a similar way:

• Read input file (compressed)
• Read huffman tree from input file
• Read bits from input file
• Get corresponding character from huffman tree
• Write character to output file

Build

Building is extremely easy with Zig.

$ zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe

How to Use

Compressing a Directory

Say you have a directory structure like this:

├── directory_to_compress
│   ├── file1.txt
│   ├── file2.txt
│   ├── file3.txt

Compress the directory like this:

./compressor directory_to_compress/ # Creates a file called directory_to_compress.cmp
./decompressor directory_to_compress.cmp # Recreates the directory_to_compress directory