frequencyy list

**blazer26** · 05-03-2006

I wanted to start on a huffman program and the first thing is to read from stdin and generate a simple frequency list. I read that it's nice to generate an additional pseduo-EOF and give it frequency of 1 so that later when you encode/decode you know when to stop. I've been able to generate the table but I haven't been able to add this extra character and I was wondering if anyone knew how to add this terminating character so that the program knows when to stop encoding/decoding.

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <limits.h>

int main()
{

     int ch;
     unsigned long array[256];
     //while ( (ch = getchar()) != EOF)
     ++array[ch];

     for(int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
        printf("%d\t%lu\n", i, array[i]);

}

This only gives me the chars that appear in the text and their frequency but I haven't been able to generate the extra EOF char with freq = 1.

**SlyMaelstrom** · 05-03-2006

EOF is NOT a character. Strings in C are terminated by the null '\0' escape sequence. Read in as much as you can and then set the next index to '\0'. If you want to read in EOF from the keyboard, the proper keys are ^Z (control+Z), I believe, but as you can see, it's quite annoying to ask for that keypress. You'd be better off taking the newline character.

**blazer26** · 05-03-2006

Yes you're right, its not really the EOF character, but I was told to just generate a new character that will will have frequency of 1 and that will represent that the file is over. I wasn't sure how to do that or how I would hard code that value in.

**dwks** · 05-03-2006

Your while loop explicitly prevents array[EOF] from ever being accessed.

EOF is a negative value (usually -1), so you'll get array[-1] or array[65535] or something. Not what you want. Just use the EOF as a pseudo-character that appears at the end of the file.

**Sebastiani** · 05-03-2006

>> I was told to just generate a new character that will will have frequency of 1 and that will represent that the file is over

you would probably have to reserve a character (which means it can't appear in the precompressed stream) or else tweak the tree so that the 'EOF' node is the farthest leaf. storing the size of the compressed data (in the compression stream, perhaps) would be much easier to implement, IMO.

**Salem** · 05-04-2006

> unsigned long array[256];
You also need to initialise this to zeros, say with

Code:

unsigned long array[256] = { 0 };

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