Question

    template<class T>
    void huffman(MinHeap<TreeNode<T>*> heap, int n)
    {
      for(int i=0;i<n-1;i++)
      {
        TreeNode<T> *first = heap.pop();
        TreeNode<T> *second = heap.pop();
        TreeNode<T> *bt = new BinaryTreeNode<T>(first, second, first.data, second.data);
        heap.push(bt);
      }
    }

In my Fundamentals of Data Structures in C++ textbook, it gave a 2 page definition of Huffman coding, and the code above. To me, the book wasn’t enough detailed, so I’ve done the googling and I learned how the process of Huffman coding works. The textbook claims that at the end of the code above, a Huffman tree is made. But to me it seems wrong, because a Huffman tree, is not necessary a complete tree, but the code above seems to always give a complete tree because of the heap.push(). So can someone explain to me how this piece of code is not wrong?

Answer 1

The heap’s tree structure does not necessarily match the resulting Huffman tree — rather, the heap contains a forest of partial Huffman trees, initially each consisting of a single symbol node. The loop then repeatedly takes the two nodes with the least weight, combines them into one node, and puts the resulting combined node back. At the end of the process, the heap contains one finished tree.