How to retain uniqueness of compressed text?
During the encoding process in compression, every character can be assigned and represented by a variable-length binary code. But, the problem with this approach is its decoding. At some point during the decoding process, two or more characters may have the same prefix of code, causing the algorithm to become confused. Hence, the “prefix rule” is used which makes sure that the algorithm only generates uniquely decodable codes. In this way, none of the codes are prefixed to the other and hence the uncertainty can be resolved.
Hence, for text file compression in this article, we decide to leverage an algorithm that gives lossless compression and uses variable-length encoding with prefix rule. The article also focuses on regenerating the original file using the decoding process.
Text File Compression And Decompression Using Huffman Coding
Text files can be compressed to make them smaller and faster to send, and unzipping files on devices has a low overhead. The process of encoding involves changing the representation of a file so that the (binary) compressed output takes less space to store and takes less time to transmit while retaining the ability to reconstruct the original file exactly from its compressed representation. Text files can be of various file types, such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, .txt, and so on. Text compression is required because uncompressed data can take up a lot of space, which is inconvenient for device storage and file sharing.