text Compression

i have to create a text compression application for uni. I was woundering how do you convert chararters into bytes/bites and vis versa??

thanks fo rthe help.
kelvin

Also have anyone got any recommendations on how i should approach the project ie read the text file into a array and then compress or read text data into a varible and then compress??? Is there a limit on the size of arrays that can be used inside C++?

thanks
kelvin

This link to Huffman Encoding might help you some on the overall compression process.

thanks, i was thinking about using dictionary bassed compression combined with null compression, what you think?

kelvin