From: Daniel Martin <martin@...>
Date: 2007-05-15T06:05:46+09:00
Subject: Re: SOLUTION QUIZ 123 # Huffman Encoder

"Rick DeNatale" <rick.denatale@gmail.com> writes:

> Extending this to binary data will involve making an input stream
> class which reads the binary data and converts it into reasonably
> sized binary string representations, and an output stream which
> accumulates the string representation of the codes and writes them as
> binary as enough data is produced.  The huffman.rb file contains these
> classes in an embrionic form.

Note that I did this with just a few methods, that yielded strings of
zeros and ones to other methods.  The structure was like this:

   encoding:
     encode called encode_bits, passing in the input io stream
     encode_bits would yield strings of 0s and 1s into a block
     that was inside encode, which used pack to squish them into
     binary bytes.

   decoding:
     decode called decode_bits, which yielded strings of 0s and 1s
     that were read from the (binary) input - unpack was used to
     make those strings.

I admit that I don't really like the separation of the logic here -
it's not really parallel between encoding and decoding, for instance -
but this works and didn't require that much code.

-- 
s=%q(  Daniel Martin -- martin@snowplow.org
       puts "s=%q(#{s})",s.to_a.last       )
       puts "s=%q(#{s})",s.to_a.last