Encoding and Decoding

General information for the business: Personal
Description of requirements/functionality: Encoding a message in a sequence of characters/symbols with the shortest possible average number of bits per character/symbol and thus minimum number of bits for the total message.

(i) Determining the frequency of the occurrence of each symbol inside the message.
(ii) Ranking the symbols in order of increasing frequency.
(iii) Combining the two lowest frequency symbols into a single composite symbol for each step. The
frequency of this new symbol is therefore the sum of the two original ones and the process is then
repeated until a single composite symbol remains.
(iv) Starting at the final symbol, it breaks-up the composite symbols, assigns 0 to the left branch
and 1 to the right branch and then creates a Huffman binary tree.
(v) The binary string from the root node to the leaf node will be used to encode the symbol at the
leaf node.