4.8 Huffman Codes and Data Compression

• Encoding Symbols Using Bits:
  • We need schemes to encode text written in richer alphabets and converts this text into long strings of bits.
    
  • The first thought would be to represent all of the symbol by the same number of bits
  • However, this is not efficient as some symbols are frequent while others are less frequent.
  • Thus symbols are represented differently depending on their frequency.
  • Data Compression Algorithms are devoted at representing large files as compact as possibly, that is they take files as input and reduce their space through efficient encoding schemes

Variable-Length Encoding Schemes:

• Basically more frequent letters are represented differently from the less frequent ones.