陈越、何钦铭-数据结构作业17：Huffman Codes哈夫曼编码

In 1953, David A. Huffman published his paper "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes", and hence printed his name in the history of computer science. As a professor who gives the final exam problem on Huffman codes, I am encountering a big problem: the Huffman codes are NOT unique. For example, given a string "aaaxuaxz", we can observe that the frequencies of the characters 'a', 'x', 'u' and 'z' are 4, 2, 1 and 1, respectively. We may either encode the symbols as {'a'=0, 'x'=10, 'u'=110, 'z'=111}, or in another way as {'a'=1, 'x'=01, 'u'=001, 'z'=000}, both compress the string into 14 bits. Another set of code can be given as {'a'=0, 'x'=11, 'u'=100, 'z'=101}, but {'a'=0, 'x'=01, 'u'=011, 'z'=001} is NOT correct since "aaaxuaxz" and "aazuaxax" can both be decoded from the code 00001011001001. The students are submitting all kinds of codes, and I need a computer program to help me determine which ones are correct and which ones are not.