COMP2521

Data Structures & Algorithms

Week 9.3

Tries

 

Author: Hayden Smith 2021

In this lecture

Why?

  • Storing a large set of strings naively can be costly, we need a more efficient way

What?

  • Tries
  • Tries insert
  • Tries lookup

Tries

Tries are a data structure for representing strings that support O(L) lookup and insertion (where L is the length of a string)

Tries Concenptualised

Depth of trie = length of longest word

Tries Concenptualised

Note: Not every word here is included in the trie

Tries Structure

Each node in a trie:

  • Contains one part of a key (typically one character)
  • May have up to 26 children
  • May be tagged as a "finishing" node
  • But even "finishing" nodes may have children
  • May contain other data for application  (e.g. word frequency)
    • A "finishing" node marks the end of one key
#define ALPHABET_SIZE 26

typedef struct Node *Trie;

typedef struct Node {
   char onechar;     // current char in key
   Trie child[ALPHABET_SIZE];
   bool finish;      // last char in key?
   Item data;        // no Item if !finish
} Node;

typedef char *Key;   // just lower-case letters

Tries Search

find(trie,key):
|  Input  trie, key
|  Output pointer to element in trie if key found
|         NULL otherwise
|
|  node=trie
|  for each char c in key do
|  |  if node.child[c] exists then
|  |     node=node.child[c]  // move down one level
|  |  else
|  |     return NULL
|  |  end if
|  end for
|  if node.finish then  // "finishing" node reached?
|     return node
|  else
|     return NULL
|  end if

Tries Insertion

Trie insert(trie, item, key):
  if trie is empty then:
    t = new trie node
  if m = 0 then  // end of key
    t.finish = true
    t.data = item
  else:
    first = key[0]
    rest = key[1..m-1]
    t.child[first] = insert(t.child[first], item, rest)
  return t

Tries Complexity

  • Space complexity: O(n)
    • n = Sum of lengths of all strings
  • Insertion complexity: O(m)
    • m = length of the key string
  • Search complexity: O(m)

BST-like Tries

Above representation is space inefficient

  • Each node has 26 possible children
  • Even with very many keys, most child links are unused

And if we allowed all ascii chars in alphabet, 128 children

 

We could reduce branching factor by reducing "alphabet"

  • Break each 8-bit char into two 4-bit "nybbles"
  • Branching factor is 16, even for full ascii char set
  • But each branch is twice as long

BST-like Tries

Compressed Tries

   
  • Have internal nodes of degree ≥ 2;   each node contains ≥ 1 char
  • Obtained by compressing non-branching chains of nodes
  • Compact representation of compressed trie to encode array S  of strings:
  • Requires O(s) space  (s = #strings in array S)

Compressed Tries

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COMP2521 21T2 - 9.3 - Tries

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