What is a trie tree?

A trie tree, also known as a prefix tree or a digital tree, is a specialized tree-based data structure that is used to efficiently store and retrieve strings or sequences of characters. It is particularly useful for tasks such as searching for words in a dictionary or implementing autocomplete functionality.

In a trie tree, each node represents a single character, and the edges connecting the nodes represent the possible characters that can follow the current character. The root node represents an empty string, and each path from the root to a leaf node represents a complete word or sequence of characters.

One key feature of a trie tree is that it allows for fast prefix matching. By traversing down the tree from the root node, it is possible to find all words or sequences that have a given prefix. This makes trie trees efficient for tasks such as autocomplete, where the user is typing a partial word and the system needs to suggest possible completions.

Trie trees have a space complexity that is proportional to the total number of characters in all the stored strings, making them memory-efficient. Additionally, trie trees have a time complexity of O(m) for searching, where m is the length of the string being searched. This makes them efficient for searching tasks, especially when the number of strings is large.

Overall, trie trees are a powerful data structure for efficiently storing and searching strings or sequences of characters, making them a valuable tool in various applications such as search engines, spell checkers, and text editors.