I've written a simple Huffman encoding in Ruby. As output I've got an array, for example:
["010", "1111", "10", "10", "110", "1110", "001", "110", "000", "10", "011"]
I need to write, and then read, it to and from a file. I tried several methods:
IO.binwrite("out.cake", array)
I get a simple text file and not binary.
Or:
File.open("out.cake", 'wb' ) do |output|
array.each do | byte |
output.print byte.chr
end
end
Which looks like it works, but then I can't read it into array.
Which encoding should I use?
I think you can just use Array#pack
and String#unpack
like the following code:
# Writing
a = ["010", "1111", "10", "10", "110", "1110", "001", "110", "000", "10", "011"]
File.open("out.cake", 'wb' ) do |output|
output.write [a.join].pack("B*")
end
# Reading
s = File.binread("out.cake")
bits = s.unpack("B*")[0] # "01011111010110111000111000010011"
I don't know your preferred format for the result of reading and I know the above method is inefficient. But anyway you can take "0" or "1" sequentially from the result of unpack
to traverse your Huffman tree.