What is Huffman Coding?

• It is a compression technique.

• It is used to reduce the size of data or messages.

• The data is compressed to reduce the size when we want to transmit data in the network to minimize the cost of transmission.

Let's apply this algorithm to a problem.

Problem: Suppose we have a message with a length of 20.

Message: BCCABBDDAECCBBAEDDCC

• The length of this message is 20

• We need ASCII code to transmit this data

• ASCII code is 8 bits per character

For 'A', the ASCII code is 65 = 01000001

For 'B', the ASCII code is 66 = 01000010

For 'C', the ASCII code is 67 = 01000011

For 'D', the ASCII code is 68 = 01000100

For 'E', the ASCII code is 69 = 01000101

If we want to send the message with the ASCII code of each character, the size will be 8 * 20 =160 bits.

So, we can use our own code rather than use the ASCII code or 8 bits code.

Fixed Size Coding

• We can use 3 bits instead of 8 bits as we have only 5 characters in our message.

• We define the length based on the number of characters in the message.

• For 5 characters, we can use 3 bits code as we can have a 2^3 =8 combination of binary