Generate Huffman codebooks! Huffman codes are the optimal way to compress individual symbols into a binary sequence that can be unambiguously decoded without inter-symbol separators (it is "prefix-free").
Provided an iterable of 2-tuples in (symbol, weight) format, generate a Huffman codebook, returned as a dictionary in {symbol: code, ...} format.
>>> huffman.codebook([('A', 2), ('B', 4), ('C', 1), ('D', 1)])
{'A': '10', 'B': '0', 'C': '110', 'D': '111'}
If you have an iterable of symbols, the collections.Counter is a handy way to tally them up.
>>> huffman.codebook(collections.Counter('man the stand banana man').items())
{' ': '111',
'a': '10',
'b': '0100',
'd': '0110',
'e': '11010',
'h': '0101',
'm': '1100',
'n': '00',
's': '11011',
't': '0111'}