Daily Coding Problem: Problem #1402 [Easy]

Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today.

This problem was asked by Amazon.

Huffman coding is a method of encoding characters based on their frequency. Each letter is assigned a variable-length binary string, such as 0101 or 111110, where shorter lengths correspond to more common letters. To accomplish this, a binary tree is built such that the path from the root to any leaf uniquely maps to a character. When traversing the path, descending to a left child corresponds to a 0 in the prefix, while descending right corresponds to 1.

Here is an example tree (note that only the leaf nodes have letters):

        *
      /   \
    *       *
   / \     / \
  *   a   t   *
 /             \
c               s

With this encoding, cats would be represented as 0000110111.

Given a dictionary of character frequencies, build a Huffman tree, and use it to determine a mapping between characters and their encoded binary strings.

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