huffman coding

[Ozguxxx]

Hey everbody, I wonder while huffman coding some byte stream is it logical to take each byte as a symbol OR is it logical to take some word or dword patterns as symbols OR do I have to mix them so that some symbols are bytes, some are words... etc? Thanx.

[Tim]

Either is good. I think your question is, "does each symbol have to be the same length?". No, but if your symbols are different lengths, it makes your encoding algorithm more complex.