I was thinking to code the huffman algorithm and trying to compress something with it, but I've got a problem. How can I represent for example a char with only 3 bits??
...I had a look to the compression modules but I can't understand them much...
I understand I can't do it easily in python, but maybe I could define a new type in C and use it to do those dirty works, what do you think?
Why do you need to create 'very small types'?
You only need actual bit-twiddling when you do the encoding/de-coding right?
If you create an encoding map 'codes' as a dict of strings of '1' and '0', encoding might look like (untested):
def encode(stream): outchar = count = 0 for char in stream: for bit in codes[char]: (outchar << 1) | (bit == "1") count +=1 if count ==8: yield chr(outchar) outchar = count = 0 if count: yield chr(outchar)
HTH Michael
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