17 lines
701 B
Markdown
17 lines
701 B
Markdown
# Trie design
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The underlying data structure is based on a combination of a ternary and a
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Patricia trie.
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* Nodes are classic ternary trie nodes, meaning each node contains a binary
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search tree
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* Each node can define a skip, like a Patricia trie, of at most 8 characters.
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These skipped characters are stored directly in the structs defining the
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nodes.
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* While the add function relies on the fact that the input is a NULL-terminated
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C string, the trie itself does not store any NULL bytes.
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The goal of this datastructure is to be as optimized as possible for search
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operations with short (usually < 8 characters) keys, as this is by far the most
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common operation for a URL shortener/pastebin.
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