Efficient variants of Huffman codes in high level languages

Although it is well-known that Huffman Codes are optimal for text compression in a character-per-chaxacter encoding scheme, they are seldom used in practical situations since they reqnire a bit-per-bit decoding algorithm, which has to be written is some assembly langnage, and will perform rather slowly. A number of methods are presented that avoid these difficulties. The decoding algorithms efficiently process the encoded string on a byte-per-byte basis, are faster than the original algorithm, and can be programmed in any high level langnage. This is achieved at the cost of storing some tables in the internal memory, but with no loss in the compression savings of the optimal Huffman codes. The internal memory space needed can be reduced either at the cost of increased processing time, or by using non-binary Huffman codes, which give sub-optimal compression. Experimental results for English and Hebrew text are also presented.