Hey guys, I'm currently trying to implement huffman compress/decompress functions. They generally work properly, but I've run into a problem: If a file only contains one type of character, say for example 'a', then when I build the tree it will have only one node - the root node - and consequently it will have no code associated with it. Thus when I write the 'compressed' file, only a frequency table and 'bits in last byte' count are written to file, and when I 'decompress' the file, I end up with an empty file even if the original was say half a gigabyte. Is there any neat solution to this problem without having to resort to special cases (for examples, if root node has no childs, assign it a code of 0)? And also how would the tree be built if the original file was empty to begin with?
**P.s. I just thought of something... have a root-root node with its 'left' pointer referencing the 'real' root node. Would this work?
**EDIT**
After doing some board searches, I'm gonna look up the Deflate algorithm and see if that helps any... But I'd still very much appreciate any responses to my question.
