What are the Hoffman coding algorithm?

Huffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm that uses variable-length codes to represent characters based on their frequencies in a given dataset. Characters that occur more frequently are assigned shorter codes, while those that occur less frequently receive longer codes, resulting in efficient encoding. The algorithm builds a binary tree, where each leaf node represents a character, and the path from the root to the leaf determines the character's code. This method is widely used in file compression formats like ZIP and image formats like JPEG.