# Huffman codes

Covering: Fixed length encoding & Variable length encoding

# Fixed length encoding

consider ascii or unicode, where each symbol is either 8-bit or 16-bits in width.

# Huffman Trees

We create a tree of character frequencies where each node basically has a character and that character's frequency.

```
struct Node {
	uint8_t c;
	size_t frequency;
	...
};
```

Rules of thumb:
	* The more frequent characters are close to the root
	* Less frequent characters are found far from the root

We'll end up with a list of nodes which we can throw into a maxheap to build our huffman tree.

General decoding process goes like this:

	1. Get frequencies of all symbols
	2. Put those frequenncies of symbols into a structure like above
	3. Build max heap of the node set
		Keep in mind however that our root should be agnostic so that we can start bit strings with 0|1
	4. When we reach a leaf we drop that char into the result