Huffman's Code

Here is a program I have written this afternoon, for one of my old friends. Basically, it's a simple one, reads character values and their frequency and generate Huffman Coding for each character. Not going to describe here what is huffman's algorithm, but it is widely used for data compression and stuff...

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <string>
#include <queue>
#include <algorithm>
using namespace std;

vector< pair< string, int > > V;

class Node {
public:
    Node *left, *right;
    int weight, ch;
    Node() {}
    Node(int _w, int _c) : weight(_w), ch(_c) { left = right = NULL; }
    ~Node() {}
};

class comp {
public:
    bool operator() (const Node &a, const Node &b) {
        return a.weight > b.weight;
    }
};

void generate(const Node *a, char *code, int depth) {
    if(a->left == NULL && a->right == NULL) {
        code[depth] = 0;
        V.push_back(pair< string, int > (code, a->ch));
        return;
    }
    if(a->left != NULL) {
        code[depth] = '0';
        generate(a->left, code, depth + 1);
    }
    if(a->right != NULL) {
        code[depth] = '1';
        generate(a->right, code, depth + 1);
    }
}

int main() {
    priority_queue< Node, vector< Node >, comp > Q;
    int ch, weight;
    char code[100];

    // read ascii and frequency
    while(cin >> ch >> weight) {
        Q.push(Node(weight, ch));
    }

    // build 2-tree
    while(Q.size() > 1) {
        Node *a = new Node;
        *a = Q.top(); Q.pop();
        Node *b = new Node;
        *b = Q.top(); Q.pop();
        Node c(a->weight + b->weight, 0);
        c.left = a, c.right = b;
        Q.push(c);
    }

    // traverse tree to generate code
    generate(&Q.top(), code, 0);

    // display character and code
    for(int i = 0; i < (int)V.size(); i++) {
        cout << V[i].first << " --> " << V[i].second << endl;
    }
    return 0;
}

Writing compressor decompressor is also easy, just make sure, you use 1 bit for each '0' or '1', not 1 byte :p