Question

How to build a Huffman tree from a list of binary codes?

Asked by: JosieNutter

I'm having a really hard time learning recursion (regardless of all the wonderful tutorials online) and am trying to figure out how to take a simple list like this and turn it into a full tree.  

The lines are paired; first is the ascii representation for a character followed by its intended position in the tree (0 for left child, 1 for right child).

101
00
256
010
99
0110
100
0111
97
10
98
11

I think part of what is throwing me is that I will need to create empy nodes in the tree leading to these leaves and am not really sure how to think about the problem or how to approach it, really... I keep coming back to grabbing all of the positions for each row by length of position string and working my way down, but that won't use recursion and seems to be more inefficient than what I could be doing (?).

Any pointers?

The list was generated by the string "aaabbbcdee" to create the tree in the code section below.  Basically, I am trying to figure out how to reverse what I did earlier... but still somehow deal with all the empty parent nodes that do not show up in the list.

+----+
                     | 10 |
                     +----+
                   /        \
                /              \
          +----+               +----+
          |  4 |               |  6 |
          +----+               +----+
         /      \             /      \
     +----+    +----+     +----+    +----+
     |  2 |    |  2 |     |  3 |    |  3 |
     +----+    +----+     +----+    +----+
       'e'    /      \      'a'       'b'
         +----+     +----+
         |  1 |     |  1 |
         +----+     +----+
           'c'        'd'

                                  
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:
11:
12:
13:
14:
15:
16:
17:

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Asked On
2009-06-15 at 21:47:01ID24494489
Tags

java

,

huffman

,

decode

Topics

Java Programming Language

,

New to Java Programming

Participating Experts
1
Points
20
Comments
9

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