How can I create a tree for Huffman encoding and decoding?

Question

For my assignment, I am to do a encode and decode for huffman trees. I have a problem creating my tree, and I am stuck.

Don\'t mind the print statements - they are just

Answer 1

One more solution returning a dictionary {label:code} and a recursive dictionary tree containing the resulting graph. The input vals is in form of dictionary {label:freq}:

def assign_code(nodes, label, result, prefix = ''):    
    childs = nodes[label]     
    tree = {}
    if len(childs) == 2:
        tree['0'] = assign_code(nodes, childs[0], result, prefix+'0')
        tree['1'] = assign_code(nodes, childs[1], result, prefix+'1')     
        return tree
    else:
        result[label] = prefix
        return label

def Huffman_code(_vals):    
    vals = _vals.copy()
    nodes = {}
    for n in vals.keys(): # leafs initialization
        nodes[n] = []

    while len(vals) > 1: # binary tree creation
        s_vals = sorted(vals.items(), key=lambda x:x[1]) 
        a1 = s_vals[0][0]
        a2 = s_vals[1][0]
        vals[a1+a2] = vals.pop(a1) + vals.pop(a2)
        nodes[a1+a2] = [a1, a2]        
    code = {}
    root = a1+a2
    tree = {}
    tree = assign_code(nodes, root, code)   # assignment of the code for the given binary tree      
    return code, tree

This can be used as:

freq = [
(8.167, 'a'), (1.492, 'b'), (2.782, 'c'), (4.253, 'd'),
(12.702, 'e'),(2.228, 'f'), (2.015, 'g'), (6.094, 'h'),
(6.966, 'i'), (0.153, 'j'), (0.747, 'k'), (4.025, 'l'),
(2.406, 'm'), (6.749, 'n'), (7.507, 'o'), (1.929, 'p'), 
(0.095, 'q'), (5.987, 'r'), (6.327, 's'), (9.056, 't'), 
(2.758, 'u'), (1.037, 'v'), (2.365, 'w'), (0.150, 'x'),
(1.974, 'y'), (0.074, 'z') ]    
vals = {l:v for (v,l) in freq}
code, tree = Huffman_code(vals)

text = 'hello' # text to encode
encoded = ''.join([code[t] for t in text])
print('Encoded text:',encoded)

decoded = []
i = 0
while i < len(encoded): # decoding using the binary graph
    ch = encoded[i]  
    act = tree[ch]
    while not isinstance(act, str):
        i += 1
        ch = encoded[i]  
        act = act[ch]        
    decoded.append(act)          
    i += 1

print('Decoded text:',''.join(decoded))

One can visualize the tree with Graphviz as:

The figure was generated by the following script as (Graphviz is needed):

def draw_tree(tree, prefix = ''):    
    if isinstance(tree, str):            
        descr = 'N%s [label="%s:%s", fontcolor=blue, fontsize=16, width=2, shape=box];\n'%(prefix, tree, prefix)
    else: # Node description
        descr = 'N%s [label="%s"];\n'%(prefix, prefix)
        for child in tree.keys():
            descr += draw_tree(tree[child], prefix = prefix+child)
            descr += 'N%s -> N%s;\n'%(prefix,prefix+child)
    return descr

import subprocess
with open('graph.dot','w') as f:
    f.write('digraph G {\n')
    f.write(draw_tree(tree))
    f.write('}') 
subprocess.call('dot -Tpng graph.dot -o graph.png', shell=True)