File Compression Tool

A command-line utility that compresses and decompresses files using Huffman coding to reduce file size while preserving data.

Technologies used

What it does

• Reads any input file and builds a frequency table of bytes.
• Constructs a Huffman tree to generate optimal prefix codes.
• Encodes the file into a compressed binary format (e.g. .huff).
• Decodes the compressed file back to the original file without loss.

Why I built it

I wanted to go deeper into low-level implementation details, data structures, and how compression actually works under the hood. This project was a good way to practice trees, heaps, bit-level operations, and designing a clean command-line interface that real users could run.

Example usage

Example commands:

• main.exe -c input.txt output.huff – compress a file
• main.exe -d output.huff restored.txt – decompress it