How to create a trie in Python

Question

I\'m interested in tries and DAWGs (direct acyclic word graph) and I\'ve been reading a lot about them but I don\'t understand what should the output trie or DAWG file look

Answer 1

Modified from senderle's method (above). I found that Python's defaultdict is ideal for creating a trie or a prefix tree.

from collections import defaultdict

class Trie:
    """
    Implement a trie with insert, search, and startsWith methods.
    """
    def __init__(self):
        self.root = defaultdict()

    # @param {string} word
    # @return {void}
    # Inserts a word into the trie.
    def insert(self, word):
        current = self.root
        for letter in word:
            current = current.setdefault(letter, {})
        current.setdefault("_end")

    # @param {string} word
    # @return {boolean}
    # Returns if the word is in the trie.
    def search(self, word):
        current = self.root
        for letter in word:
            if letter not in current:
                return False
            current = current[letter]
        if "_end" in current:
            return True
        return False

    # @param {string} prefix
    # @return {boolean}
    # Returns if there is any word in the trie
    # that starts with the given prefix.
    def startsWith(self, prefix):
        current = self.root
        for letter in prefix:
            if letter not in current:
                return False
            current = current[letter]
        return True

# Now test the class

test = Trie()
test.insert('helloworld')
test.insert('ilikeapple')
test.insert('helloz')

print test.search('hello')
print test.startsWith('hello')
print test.search('ilikeapple')