208. Implement Trie (Prefix Tree)

1. Description

A trie (pronounced as “try”) or prefix tree is a tree data structure used to efficiently store and retrieve keys in a dataset of strings. There are various applications of this data structure, such as autocomplete and spellchecker.
Implement the Trie class:

• Trie() Initializes the trie object.
• void insert(String word) Inserts the string word into the trie.
• boolean search(String word) Returns true if the string word is in the trie (i.e., was inserted before), and false otherwise.
• boolean startsWith(String prefix) Returns true if there is a previously inserted string word that has the prefix prefix, and false otherwise.

2. Example

Example 1

Input
[“Trie”, “insert”, “search”, “search”, “startsWith”, “insert”, “search”]
[[], [“apple”], [“apple”], [“app”], [“app”], [“app”], [“app”]]
Output
[null, null, true, false, true, null, true]

Explanation
Trie trie = new Trie();
trie.insert(“apple”);
trie.search(“apple”); // return True
trie.search(“app”); // return False
trie.startsWith(“app”); // return True
trie.insert(“app”);
trie.search(“app”); // return True

3. Constraints

• 1 <= word.length, prefix.length <= 2000
• word and prefix consist only of lowercase English letters.
• At most 3 * 10$^4$ calls in total will be made to insert, search, and startsWith.

4. Solutions

Trie

class Trie {
public:
    Trie() {}

    void insert(const string &word) {
        Trie *iter = this;
        for (char letter : word) {
            if (iter->children[letter - 'a'] == nullptr) {
                iter->children[letter - 'a'] = new Trie();
            }

            iter = iter->children[letter - 'a'];
        }

        iter->end_letter = true;
    }

    bool search(const string &word) {
        Trie *iter = this;
        for (char letter : word) {
            if (iter->children[letter - 'a'] == nullptr) {
                return false;
            }

            iter = iter->children[letter - 'a'];
        }

        return iter->end_letter;
    }

    bool startsWith(const string &prefix) {
        Trie *iter = this;
        for (char letter : prefix) {
            if (iter->children[letter - 'a'] == nullptr) {
                return false;
            }

            iter = iter->children[letter - 'a'];
        }

        return true;
    }

private:
    array<Trie *, 26> children = {};
    bool end_letter = false;
};