Advanced Python Programming

Tries

A perhaps less popular data structure, very useful in practice, is the trie (sometimes called prefix tree). Tries are extremely fast at matching a list of strings against a prefix. This is especially useful when implementing features such as search-as-you type and autocompletion, where the list of available completions is very large and short response times are required.

Unfortunately, Python does not include a trie implementation in its standard library; however, many efficient implementations are readily available through PyPI. The one we will use in this subsection is patricia-trie, a single-file, pure Python implementation of trie. As an example, we will use patricia-trie to perform the task of finding the longest prefix in a set ...