title: How can I reduce the time?
body: <p>I'm trying to reduce the time when I compress a file from a string, and after I descompress. Dic is the dictionary obtained from the Huffman algorithm. The input for the compress function is a .txt, for the descompress function the input file, is the output file from the compress function.</p>
  
  <pre><code>def compress(dic,archivo,outfile):
      content = (open(archivo,'rt', encoding = 'utf-8')).read()
      res = ''
      for ch in content:
         res = res + dic[ch]
      outf = open(outfile,'wb')
      pickle.dump(int('1'+ res,2),outf)
      outf.close()
      pass
  
  def descompress(dic,infile,outfile):
      data = bin(pickle.load(open(infile,'rb')))
      k = 1
      chain = ''
      cadena = ''
      for i in data:
          if k&gt;3:
              chain = chain + i           
              if (chain in dic) == True: 
                 cadena = cadena + dic[chain]
                 chain = ''      
          else:
             k = k + 1
      outfile = open(outfile,'w',encoding = 'utf-8')
      outfile.write(cadena)
      pass
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Well, I start reading with k=3 at the code in the function descompress because it starts with '0b1' and this is nothing. Sorry for my bad english.</p>