Hey guys, could you help me out with a problem?

I'm trying to program the Huffman Encoding algorithm in Lua, and I'm having trouble sorting my tables in order.

Script:

-- Lua version of Huffman Encoding
local buffer = {}		-- This is where the characters of <str> get broken down into 0/1 if statements.
local input = ""

function Enc(s)					-- <s> for string

	buffer = {}					-- new buffer (global for decoding)
	local c = {}				-- use to count unique characters in s and how often the occur
	local l = string.len(s)		-- gets the length of the string


	-- This separates all unique characters and counts their occurance in <s>
	for i = 1,l do
		local n = string.sub(s,i,i)	-- the Next single character in <s>
		if n then -- Check if the current character has already been added to <c>
			if c[n] then
				c[n] = c[n] + 1
				print("Added character:",n,c[n])
			else
				c[n] = 1
				print("New character:",n)
			end
		end
	end

	print("Bef",table.concat(c," "))
	table.sort(c,function(v0,v1) return c[v0] > c[v1] and v0 or v1 end)
	print("Aft",table.concat(c," "))
end

function Dec(b)	-- b for binary
	
end

Enc("AABBBC")

Just to give you an idea, the huffman process converts text to binary, and builds a hierarchy of the most occurring characters to the least occurring characters.

The Enc function first goes through the string (s) and counts how many times a letter has occurred, writing a table (c) with the Index representing the letter, and value representing the occurrence: c = { "A" = 2; "B" = 3; "C" = 1; }

I want to sort this according to Value - not Index, but I'm struggling how the sort function works, especially since it doesn't allow prints from inside the sort function... =[

Any help with the sort function would be really appreciated.

AnonymousEdited