1. Introduction

This section is part of the compression topic.

Before reading this area, please read the general section on compression first. This will give you the background needed to underdstand the concepts which we cover here.

We are going to discuss a very popular method of acheiving lossless compression algorithm. It is called Huffman encoding.

This method relies on repeating patterns being present in the data that is to be compressed. For example, a text file is made up of repeated individual letters, spaces and symbols.