Algorithms in C, Parts 1-4: Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching, Third Edition

Chapter Fifteen. Radix Search

Several search methods proceed by examining the search keys one small piece at a time, rather than using full comparisons between keys at each step. These methods, called radix-search methods, operate in a manner entirely analogous to the radix-sorting methods that we discussed in Chapter 10. They are useful when the pieces of the search keys are easily accessible, and they can provide efficient solutions to a variety of practical search tasks.

We use the same abstract model that we used in Chapter 10: Depending on the context, a key may be a word (a fixed-length sequence of bytes) or a string (a variable-length sequence of bytes). We treat keys that are words as numbers represented in a base-R number system, for ...