Implementing a simple Trie for efficient Levenshtein Distance calculation - Java

Question

UPDATE 3

Done. Below is the code that finally passed all of my tests. Again, this is modeled after Murilo Vasconcelo\'s modified version of Steve

Answer 1

As I see it right, you want to loop over all branches of the trie. That's not that difficult using a recursive function. I'm using a trie as well in my k-nearest neighbor algorithm, using the same kind of function. I don't know Java, however but here's some pseudocode:

function walk (testitem trie)
   make an empty array results
   function compare (testitem children distance)
     if testitem = None
        place the distance and children into results
     else compare(testitem from second position, 
                  the sub-children of the first child in children,
                  if the first item of testitem is equal to that 
                  of the node of the first child of children 
                  add one to the distance (! non-destructive)
                  else just the distance)
        when there are any children left
             compare (testitem, the children without the first item,
                      distance)
    compare(testitem, children of root-node in trie, distance set to 0)
    return the results

Hope it helps.