Huffman Coding Visualizer

Huffman Coding is a lossless data compression algorithm that assigns variable-length codes to characters based on their frequencies.

Algorithm Steps:

1. Calculate Frequency: Count the occurrence of each character in the input text
2. Create Leaf Nodes: Create a leaf node for each character with its frequency
3. Build Priority Queue: Insert all nodes into a min-heap ordered by frequency
4. Build Tree: Repeatedly extract two nodes with minimum frequency, create a parent node with combined frequency, and insert back into the queue
5. Generate Codes: Traverse the tree from root to leaves, assigning 0 for left edges and 1 for right edges
6. Encode: Replace each character in the original text with its Huffman code

Key Properties:

• Prefix-free: No code is a prefix of another code
• Optimal: Produces the shortest average code length among all prefix codes
• Variable-length: More frequent characters get shorter codes
• Lossless: Original data can be perfectly reconstructed