In the talk The Mess We’re In, Joe Armstrong mentions a system he imagined that merges similar programs that do the same thing; to essentially delete all duplicate programs. This reminded me of a program I have previously written, a Java implementation of the Huffman compression algorithm. I am currently learning Elixir and thought it would be an interesting exercise to implement the algorithm in a functional manner.

This post is the first in a series which will be exploring powerful, although seemingly basic, features of the Elixir programming language which make implementing the Huffman algorithm a breeze. Some of the features we will be using are: binary pattern matching, iolists, and recursion.

You are currently reading part one of the series. Part one will serve as an introduction to the Huffman algorithm and the data structures we will be using to implement the the algorithm. You can find the full code with comments, typespecs, and tests on Github.

Introduction

David Huffman, who founded the computer science department at my alma mater UC Santa Cruz (go banana slugs!), invented the Huffman algorithm in 1951 while he was a student at MIT. Huffman was tasked with an assignment to generate efficient binary encodings. Huffman realized he could generate these encodings with a frequency sorted binary tree. Huffman managed to create a better algorithm than the professor who gave the assignment!

Efficient binary encodings? Frequency sorted binary tree? What are these things? Thankfully, we don’t need a degree from MIT to understand these concepts.

First, we need a basic understanding of how text is stored in files. Computers can only store binary data, however, binary data is unreadable to (most) people. Fortunately for us, characters such as ‘x’, ‘1’, or ‘

’ can be encoded as binary data in a variety of ways. One such encoding, ASCII, stores characters as binary data in either seven or eight bits. With seven bits we can store the values 0 - 127. This gives us 128 possible characters we can encode with ASCII. With eight bits we can store 0 - 255 for 256 possible characters. For the following example assume we’re using eight bit ASCII.

For example, the character ‘x’ is represented by the decimal value 120 or binary 1111000 . You can find ASCII tables online for more examples. Consider the string “go go gophers”. This string can be encoded as:

01100111 01101111 01100000 01100111 01101111 01000000 01100111 01101111 01110000 01101000 01100101 01110010 01110011

However, the string “go go gophers” only has 8 unique characters: ‘g’, ‘o’, ‘ ‘, ‘p’, ‘h’, ‘e’, ‘r’, and ‘s’. This means we can create an encoding using only three bits. We can create a lookup table for our encoding:

'g' => 000 'o' => 001 ' ' => 010 'p' => 011 'h' => 100 'e' => 101 'r' => 110 's' => 111

With our lookup table we can encode “go go gophers” as:

000 001 010 000 001 010 000 001 011 100 101 110 111

With ASCII we need 104 bits to store the string, however, with our encoding we only need 39 bits! These are the “efficient binary encodings” Huffman was looking for!

However, Huffman realized he could do better. Notice that the characters ‘g’, ‘o’, and ‘ ‘ occur more frequently than the rest of the characters in our example string. Huffman’s algorithm creates more efficient encodings by assigning smaller (less bits) encodings to characters which occur more frequently. Let’s take a basic look at how the Huffman algorithm works.

Huffman Algorithm

Huffman’s algorithm compresses text by generating smaller encodings for characters that occur more frequently than others. A general description of the algorithm is:

Find the occurrence count (weight) of each character for some input text Store each character and the character’s weight in a priority queue Merge the elements of the priority queue into a binary tree, where each leaf node in the tree stores a character and the character’s weight Iterate over the binary tree. Store a 0 when iterating to the left of some node or a 1 when iterating to the right of some node. When a leaf node is processed, return the “path” of 0’s and 1’s we took to get to the leaf node Replace each character of the input text with the encoding we found in step 4.

Huffman’s algorithm is a “greedy” algorithm. During step 3 the algorithm makes a local decision to pick to the two lowest weight elements which results in an optimal encoding tree. For a more in depth description of the algorithm, I recommend this resource.

The next section will explain the two data structures we will be using to implement the algorithm: a binary tree and a priority queue.

Data Structures – Explanation

If you are already familiar with binary trees and priority queues feel free to skip to the next section.

There are two data structures that we need to implement: a binary tree and a priority queue. I will not cover the intricacies of these data structures. There are plenty of resources online if you are unfamiliar or need a refresher on the details of these data structures. However, let’s take a look at the basics.

Binary Tree

A binary tree node is a singular element which can contain some data and pointers to up to two “children” elements. A node’s children can have its own children. A collection of binary tree nodes form a binary tree. However, a binary tree is typically only represented by a singular tree node – the “root” of the binary tree. The entire binary tree can be iterated over by looking at the children of the root node, the children of those nodes, and so on. Tree nodes with no children are called leaf nodes.

+---------------------------+ | Data: "a" | | | < Root |Left Child Right Child| +-+----------------------+--+ | | | | +--------------+----------+ +---+---------------------+ | Data: "b" | | Data: "c" | | | | | < Leaf node |Left Child Right Child| |Left Child Right child| +---+----------------+----+ +----+----------------+---+ | | | | +------+------+ +-----+------+ +------+-----+ +-----+------+ | nil | | nil | | nil | | nil | +-------------+ +------------+ +------------+ +------------+

Priority Queue

A priority queue is similar to a queue, however, the queue is sorted by priority. Consider the following queue operations:

[] :: initial queue [{ priority: 3 }] :: insert with priority 3 [{ priority: 3 }, { priority: 1 }] :: insert with priority 1 { priority: 3 }, [{ priority: 1 }] :: dequeue

Since a queue is a first-in-first-out data structure, elements are removed in the order which they were placed in the queue. Since we inserted the element with priority 3 before the element with priority 1, it came off the queue first. Consider the same operations on a priority queue (assuming 1 is a higher priority value than 3):

[] :: initial queue [{ priority: 3 }] :: insert with priority 3 [{ priority: 1 }, { priority: 3 }] :: insert with priority 1 { priority: 1 }, [{ priority: 1 }] :: dequeue

Notice that in the priority queue elements are placed into the queue depending on their priority. This also means that elements are removed from the queue in order of priority.

Now that we have an understanding of the data structures, lets take a look at how we can implement them in Elixir.

Data Structures – Implementation

Tree Node Implementation

Let’ start by creating a new mix project, and creating a file for our implementation of the binary tree node.

mix new huffman touch lib/huffman/tree_node.ex

We will be using a struct to represent the tree nodes. In Elixir a struct is similar to a map, however, it has tagged keys. For our tree node we want to store: a character, a weight (the character’s frequency), and the left and right children. Let’s take a quick look at the interfaces for the functions we will need to implement:

from_tuple/1 : create a TreeNode from a { character, weight } tuple merge/2 : merge two TreeNodes into a new parent TreeNode

Let’s open lib/huffman/tree_node.ex and complete the implementation of the struct and functions.

defmodule Huffman . TreeNode do defstruct [ :character , :left , :right , weight: 0 ] alias __MODULE__ def from_tuple ({ character , weight }) do % TreeNode { character: character , weight: weight } end def merge ( left_child , right_child ) do weight = left_child . weight + right_child . weight % TreeNode { weight: weight , left: left_child , right: right_child } end end

In our implementation only leaf nodes will store a character. When nodes are merged, we will store the sum of the child node’s weights in the new parent node. We will see why we must do this in the binary tree implementation.

Let’s open an iex shell and test our code:

iex ( 1 ) > % Huffman . TreeNode {} % Huffman . TreeNode { character: nil , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 0 } iex ( 2 ) > left_child = Huffman . TreeNode . from_tuple ({ "a" , 4 }) % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "a" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 4 } iex ( 3 ) > right_child = Huffman . TreeNode . from_tuple ({ "b" , 2 }) % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "b" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 2 } iex ( 4 ) > Huffman . TreeNode . merge ( left_child , right_child ) % Huffman . TreeNode { character: nil , left: % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "a" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 4 }, right: % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "b" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 2 }, weight: 6 }

Priority Queue Implementation

We will use a list as the backbone of our priority queue implementation. Our implementation will queue TreeNode structs in order of increasing character weight. That is to say, a character with frequency 1 will come before a character with frequency 3 in the priority queue. Let’s look at the interfaces for the functions we need to implement:

from_map/1 : convert a % { character => weight } map to a priority queue pop/1 : pop the lowest weight element off of the priority queue insert/2 : insert an element into a priority queue

Let’s create the file lib/huffman/priority_queue.ex and start with our implementation of pop/1 .

defmodule Huffman . PriorityQueue do def pop ([]), do : nil def pop ([ head | tail ]), do : { head , tail } end

We have two versions of pop/1 . The pop([]) function will be called if an empty priority queue is passed into pop/1 . In this case, there is nothing to pop off of the queue, so we simply return nil . The second case, pop([head | tail]) will execute when pop/1 is called with a non-empty list. The head variable will match an element on the front of the queue and tail variable will match the remainder of the list. We return the head and tail in a tuple.

Now, let’s look at the implementation of insert/2 . This function will take a priority queue and a TreeNode as parameters. The function will insert the new element onto the front of the queue then sort the queue to maintain the priority ordering of the elements.

defmodule Huffman . PriorityQueue do ... def insert ( queue , elem ), do : [ elem | queue ] |> sort () defp sort ([]), do : [] defp sort ( queue ), do : Enum . sort ( queue , & sort / 2 ) defp sort (%{ weight: weight_left }, %{ weight: weight_right }), do : weight_left <= weight_right end

Let’s dive into what’s happening when we sort the priority queue. If an empty queue is passed in we have no work to do, simply return an empty list. If a non-empty queue is passed in, we use Enum.sort/2 to sort the queue with a given sort function. Our actual sort function sort/2 , given two TreeNode s, will pattern match on the :weight key of each element, and compare them.

The final function we need to implement is from_map/1 . This function will take in a %{character => count} map and return a priority queue.

defmodule Huffman . PriorityQueue do alias Huffman . TreeNode ... def from_map ( char_counts ) when is_map ( char_counts ) do char_counts |> Enum . into ([]) |> Enum . map ( & TreeNode . from_tuple ( &1 )) |> sort () end end

The function takes the map, uses Enum.into/2 to convert the map into a list of tuples. Each tuple will have the form of {character, weight} . The list of tuples is then passed into Enum.map/2 which will convert each tuple with Huffman.TreeNode.from_tuple/1 . At this point, we have a list of TreeNode s, however, they are not sorted. We pass the unsorted queue into sort/1 which will return a priority queue.

Let’s see some examples of the code we just implemented:

iex ( 1 ) > queue = Huffman . PriorityQueue . from_map (%{ "a" => 4 , "b" => 1 }) [ % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "b" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 1 }, % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "a" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 4 } ] iex ( 2 ) > Huffman . PriorityQueue . pop ( queue ) {% Huffman . TreeNode { character: "b" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 1 }, [% Huffman . TreeNode { character: "a" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 4 }]} iex ( 3 ) > new_node = Huffman . TreeNode . from_tuple ({ "d" , 2 }) % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "d" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 2 } iex ( 4 ) > Huffman . PriorityQueue . insert ( queue , new_node ) [ % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "b" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 1 }, % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "d" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 2 }, % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "a" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 4 } ]

Tree Implementation

Now that we have our implementations the tree nodes and priority queue, we can use both of them to construct the Huffman tree. As always, let’s look at the interfaces to the functions we will implement:

from_priority_queue/1 : create a Huffman tree from a TreeNode priority queue inorder/1 : complete an inorder traversal of the Huffman tree to generate encodings

Let’s first take a look at the implementation of from_priority_queue/1 :

defmodule Huffman . Tree do alias Huffman . { PriorityQueue , TreeNode } def from_priority_queue ( queue ), do : flatten ( queue ) defp flatten ([ root | []]), do : root defp flatten ( queue ) do { left_child , queue } = PriorityQueue . pop ( queue ) { right_child , queue } = PriorityQueue . pop ( queue ) parent = TreeNode . merge ( left_child , right_child ) queue = PriorityQueue . insert ( queue , parent ) flatten ( queue ) end end

We implemented two variations of the helper function flatten/1 . The first case flatten([root | []]) matches when a priority queue with only one element is passed in. This is the base of the recursion – the final element in the queue is the root of the Huffman tree.

The second variation will match when flatten/1 is called with a priority queue with more than one element. In this function we pop the two lowest weight elements off of the queue, merge them together into a new node, insert the new node into the queue, and continue the recursion.

Notice that we are always merging together the two lowest weight nodes. By doing this, the lowest weight nodes are nested deeper in the final tree than the highest cost nodes. This has the implication that the highest weight nodes will have the shortest encodings. Exactly what we want! Remember that when we merge two nodes together, their weight is stored in the resulting parent node. This is required so that we can nest the child trees in the “correct” place to ensure our final encodings are globally optimal.

Let’s see what the output of the from_priority_queue/1 function looks like:

iex ( 1 ) > queue = Huffman . PriorityQueue . from_map (%{ "a" => 1 , "b" => 2 , "c" => 5 }) [ % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "a" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 1 }, % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "b" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 2 }, % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "c" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 5 } ] iex ( 2 ) > Huffman . Tree . from_priority_queue ( queue ) % Huffman . TreeNode { character: nil , left: % Huffman . TreeNode { character: nil , left: % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "a" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 1 }, right: % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "b" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 2 }, weight: 3 }, right: % Huffman . TreeNode { character: "c" , left: nil , right: nil , weight: 5 }, weight: 8 }

Notice that the lowest weight nodes (“a”, “b”) are nested deeper in the tree than the higher cost node (“c”).

Now that we have the ability to construct a Huffman tree, we can generate the frequency encodings for each character with an inorder traversal of the tree. I will not cover what an inorder traversal is, however, there are plenty of resources online if you need a refresher.

Let’s look at the implementation of inorder/1 :

defmodule Huffman . Tree do ... def inorder ( root ) do { :ok , agent } = Agent . start ( fn -> %{} end ) inorder ( root , <<>> , agent ) encoding_map = Agent . get ( agent , fn state -> state end ) Agent . stop ( agent ) encoding_map end defp inorder (%{ left: nil , right: nil } = node , encoding , agent ) do Agent . update ( agent , & Map . put ( &1 , node . character , encoding )) end defp inorder ( node , encoding , agent ) do inorder ( node . left , << encoding :: bitstring , << 0 :: size ( 1 ) >> :: bitstring >> , agent ) inorder ( node . right , << encoding :: bitstring , << 1 :: size ( 1 ) >> :: bitstring >> , agent ) end end

The inorder/1 function creates an Agent which is used to store the state of the recursion. The Agent will be used to store the encoding for a character when we reach a leaf node. Recall that the Huffman tree leaf nodes are the nodes that actually store the characters.

The inorder/1 function calls inorder/3 with some initial values: the root of the Huffman tree, an empty binary, and the Agent process ID. We have two variations of inorder/3 . The first matches when the recursion is at a leaf node in the tree (the :left and :right keys of the current node are nil ). This case stores the character and the generated encoding for this character in the Agent .

The second variation of inorder/3 does the heavy lifting in the traversal. Each time this function is called, the encoding parameter is appended with either a 0::size(1) or 1::size(1) bitstring. We use the left or right child and the updated encoding for the next “iteration” of the recursion.

Now we can generate frequency based encodings from a character count map! Let’s see what the output looks like:

iex ( 1 ) > %{ "g" => 3 , "o" => 3 , " " => 2 , "p" => 1 , "h" => 1 , "e" => 1 , "r" => 1 , "s" => 1 } \ ... ( 1 ) > |> Huffman . PriorityQueue . from_map () \ ... ( 1 ) > |> Huffman . Tree . from_priority_queue () \ ... ( 1 ) > |> Huffman . Tree . inorder () %{ " " => << 7 :: size ( 3 ) >> , "e" => << 12 :: size ( 4 ) >> , "g" => << 1 :: size ( 2 ) >> , "h" => << 13 :: size ( 4 ) >> , "o" => << 2 :: size ( 2 ) >> , "p" => << 2 :: size ( 4 ) >> , "r" => << 3 :: size ( 4 ) >> , "s" => << 0 :: size ( 3 ) >> }

Notice that the characters that occur more frequently (‘g’, ‘o’, ‘ ‘) have smaller encodings than characters which occur more frequently. With our frequency based encodings we can encode the string “go go gophers” in 37 bits. That’s two bits less than the “three bits per character” encoding.

Conclusion

Right now we have the ability to generate Huffman encodings from an input character frequency map. We’re close to being able to compress some input data! In the next part of this blog series we will implement character counter and IO helper modules. With those two modules implemented we will be able to actually compress and decompress input data!