algorithm - Should we Include spaces in Huffman Coding method

Question

When we encode using huffman coding method.Should we include spaces into consideration as well?

标签： algorithmhuffman-code

Answer 1

The Huffman coding [wiki] encodes a stream of characters. These characters can include spaces, symbols, emoji characters, characters with diacritics, etc.

So we take spaces into account as well, otherwise if we would decode the string, the decoded string will not contain these spaces anymore.

In fact the Wikipedia article contains an image of a Huffman encoding tree that shows a space, at the righmost leaf: