Trie

Learning Goals

  • Learn more about data structures
  • Work with a trie

puppies

Background

Imagine you just rescued a dog and you’re deciding on a name. You found a file online with a list of about 150 of the most popular dog names! You are curious as to whether or not the names you are considering are on this list. Since trie’s are great for data lookups, we’ve given you some (almost!) complete code in trie.c. There is one function, check, which is not yet implemented. Your job is to complete this function.

Demo

Getting Started

  1. Log into code.cs50.io using your GitHub account.
  2. Click inside the terminal window and execute cd.
  3. Execute wget https://cdn.cs50.net/2022/fall/labs/5/trie.zip followed by Enter in order to download a zip called trie.zip in your codespace. Take care not to overlook the space between wget and the following URL, or any other character for that matter!
  4. Now execute unzip trie.zip to create a folder called trie.
  5. You no longer need the ZIP file, so you can execute rm trie.zip and respond with “y” followed by Enter at the prompt.

Implementation Details

Notice that the trie itself is implemented through the creative use of several structs called node. Each node in a trie has an array of (potential) children, with size 26—one potential child for each letter of the alphabet! Adding words to this trie, notice that—for every letter in a word—we create a new node child whose parent is either the root node (for the first letter) or the previous letter (if not the first letter). On the very last letter, we set the is_word attribute of the child node to true. Now, checking if a word is in our trie is as easy as following each letter of that word through our trie. If we get to the final letter and see that is_word is true, well, that name is in our trie!

  • Hints
    • You probably want to start by setting a node pointer, cursor to the root of the trie.
    • Iterate through every letter in the argument word and, as you do, determine the array index that corresponds to that letter.
    • You can use the index for a letter to check if children[index] is a NULL pointer, meaning the word does not exist in the trie.
    • If children[index] is in fact a node, you can reset cursor to this node and check for the next letter in its children nodes.
    • Remember that the lookup should be case-insensitive. For instance, A and a should correspond to 0, B and b corresponds to 1, etc.

Thought Question

  • When might you want to use a trie as a data structure? When might you not?

How to Test Your Code

Your program should behave per the examples below.

trie/ $ ./trie dog_names.txt
Check word: Molly
Found!

trie/ $ ./trie dog_names.txt
Check word: Lucy
Found!

trie/ $ ./trie dog_names.txt
Check word: Prudence
Not Found.

No check50 for this one!

To evaluate that the style of your code, type in the following at the $ prompt.

style50 trie.c

How to Submit

No need to submit! This is a practice problem.