File-compression-using-Huffman-and-other

📦 File Compression Using Huffman and LZW

💡 Inspiration

With the explosion of digital data, efficient storage and faster transmission have become essential. We aimed to build a tool that compresses text files using classical algorithms like Huffman Coding and LZW — combining academic depth with practical use.

⚙️ How We Built It

• Implemented in C++ using standard template libraries
• Huffman Coding: Frequency-based binary tree encoding
• LZW Compression: Dictionary-based approach for repeating patterns
• Used file I/O for reading/writing large files efficiently
• Developed a simple CLI for user-friendly input/output file handling

🔍 Features

• Support for .txt files
• Huffman compression with visualized tree construction
• LZW compression with dynamic dictionary building
• CLI-based usage: fast, lightweight, and portable
• Accuracy testing by comparing file sizes pre- and post-compression

🧩 Challenges Faced

• Bit-level file writing in C++ required custom handling
• Handling special cases like repeated characters or very short files
• Debugging binary I/O and tree traversal issues

📚 What We Learned

• The inner workings of compression algorithms
• Managing file operations and memory usage in C++
• Balancing compression ratio vs. performance
• Importance of clean code structure for algorithm-heavy logic

Built With

• c++
• cli
• file-i/o
• huffman-tree
• lzw-algorithm
• stl