This class is intented to perform Huffman static compression on files with a PHP script.
Such compression is essentially useful for reducing the size of texts by about 43% ; it is at its best when working with data containing strong redundancies at the character level -- that is, the opposite of a binary file in which the characters would be spread over the whole ASCII alphabet.
It is questionable whether anyone would want to do such an operation with PHP, when C implementations of much stronger and more versatile algorithms are readily avaible as PHP functions. The main drawback of this script class is slowness despite processing intensiveness (7 to 8 seconds to compress a 300Kb text, about 25 seconds to expand it back).
This class will therefore probably find more of a pedagogical purpose more than anything else. That is the context it was written in, anyway. |
