bitstream

In an ongoing endeavour to efficiently fiddle with bits (e.g. see this SO question ) the newest challenge is the efficient streaming and consumption of bits. As a first simple task I choose to find the longest sequence of identical bits in a bitstream generated by /dev/urandom . A typical incantation would be head -c 1000000 </dev/urandom | my-exe . The actual goal is to stream bits and decode an Elias gamma code , for example, i.e. codes that are not chunks of bytes or multiples thereof. For such codes of variable length it is nice to have the take , takeWhile , group , etc. language for list

I'm working on a Huffman coding/decoding project in C and have a good understanding of how the algorithm should store information about the Huffman tree, re-build the tree during decoding, and decompress to the original input file using variable-length codes. When writing to my compressed file, I will output a table of 256 4-byte integers containing unique frequencies, and I know I will also have to figure out a way to handle EOF - worrying about that later. My question is how should I complete the necessary bit-wise operations to write a stream of variable-length codes to a series of 1-byte

As a follow up to Store 2 4-bit numbers in 1 8 bit number , I am wondering if there is a generalization to it where you can store n x-bit numbers into m y-bit numbers. For example, maybe you can store 5 8-bit numbers into 3 15-bit numbers. Or maybe 2 8-bit numbers into 1 16-bit number, or 3 16-bit numbers into 2 32-bit numbers. Wondering what the implementation would be for encoding and decoding for a procedure that did this, or if it's not possible. Something like: function encode(i, s1, n, s2) { // i = array of input bytes // s1 = size of input bytes // n = number of output bytes // s2 =

I am writing a huffman implementation in Python as a learning exercise. I have got to the point of writing out my variable length huffman codes to a buffer (or file). Only to find there does not seem to be a bitstream class implemented by Python! I have had a look at the array and struct modules but they do not seem to do what I need without extra work. A bit of goggling turned up this bitstream implementation, which is more like what I am wanting. Is there really no comparable bitstream class in the Python standard library? You're right that there's nothing in the standard library, but have