Constructing codes with bounded codeword lengths (Corresp.)

When the letter probabilities for a message source are unknown, it may be imprudent to construct a Huffman code for based on the relative frequencies of the letters in a sample message . Rather, a more cautious approach is to select an integer and to construct the code which encodes most efficiently subject to the restriction that codewords are at most bits long. This correspondence describes an algorithm for calculating in steps.