Huffman coding

algorithm A data compression technique which varies the

length of the encoded symbol in proportion to its information

content, that is the more often a symbol or token is used, the

shorter the binary string used to represent it in the

compressed stream. Huffman codes can be properly decoded

because they obey the prefix property, which means that no

code can be a prefix of another code, and so the complete set

of codes can be represented as a binary tree, known as a

Huffman tree. Huffman coding was first described in a seminal

paper by D.A. Huffman in 1952.

(1994-12-23)