Trie Introduction
Imagine you have a dictionary and you want to find all words starting with a prefix quickly. A trie (pronounced "try") is a tree data structure that stores strings, enabling fast prefix search. Each node represents a character, and paths from root to leaf form words. It's used in autocomplete, spell checkers, and IP routing.
A trie node typically contains:
- An array of child nodes (size 26 for lowercase letters).
- A boolean flag to mark if a node is the end of a word.
Java implementation of a TrieNode:
public class TrieNode {
TrieNode[] children = new TrieNode[26];
boolean isEndOfWord;
}
The root node is empty. Inserting a word walks down the tree, creating nodes as needed.
Two Minute Drill
- Trie is a tree for storing strings with fast prefix search.
- Each node has an array of children (26 for letters).
- Path from root to node forms a prefix; a boolean marks word end.
- Time O(L) for insert/search (L = word length).
- Used in autocomplete, dictionary, pattern matching.
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