README.md

java-trie

Try the demo, or read more about the file format.

There are two main components to this project.

Java Implementation

A Java Trie / DAWG implementation, focusing on memory efficiency for ASCII trees (letters a-z, lowercase).

This implementation uses a sparse array to store children, and an int bit set to indicate which children a given node has, and whether a node is a valid end-of-word.

It includes a compress() function which greatly reduces the Trie's memory footprint.

The Java implementation includes a way to dump the Trie structure to an efficient binary format. You can then load this binary file into a JavaScript array, and have fast and low-memory Trie lookup operations on the client.

Creating a Trie in Java

trie = new MemoryEfficientTrie(Arrays.asList("cat", "zap"));
trie.add("bat");
trie.compress(); // merges shared suffixes, trims arrays
trie.containsWord("cat"); // true
trie.containsWord("cap"); // false

JavaScript Implementation

The JavaScript implementation loads a pre-generated binary file containing an optimal representation of the Trie data.

Loading a Trie

var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.open("GET", "trie.data", true);
oReq.responseType = "arraybuffer";
oReq.onload = function (oEvent) {
	var arrayBuffer = oReq.response; // Note: not oReq.responseText
	if (arrayBuffer) {
		var byteArray = new Int32Array(arrayBuffer);
		trie = new Trie(byteArray);
		trie.containsWord('yurt'); // true
		trie.containsWord('yur'); // false
		trie.containsPrefix('yur'); // true
		trie.containsPrefix('yuq'); // false
	}
};
oReq.send(null);

Binary File Format

The binary format is an array of int objects.

Each node in the Trie is written to the array, first with the bit set value, followed by zero or more reference addresses for the node's children. These reference addresses point to other indices in the data array.