Huffman encoding of strings but without TREES!

huffman_encode.py

from collections import Counter
s= input()
c= Counter(s)
cc= sorted(c.items(), key= lambda x: x[1], reverse= True)
huff_map= {}
a, b= '0', '1'
for x in range(len(cc)-1):
  huff_map[cc[x][0]]= a*x + b #assigns 0, 01, 001 to n-1 chars
huff_map[cc[x+1][0]]= a* (len(cc)-1) #assigns 000..0 to nth char
print(huff_map) #prints the huffman mapping
for i in s:
  print(huff_map[i], end='') #prints 010101..100