101 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
101 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
[](https://drone.friedl.net/incubator/bytetrie)
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# Bytetrie
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A fast, dependency-free, self-compressing trie with radix 256 in pure python.
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Bytetrie allows fast prefix search in a large corpus of keys. Each key can be
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associated with arbitrary data. It features fast lookup times at the cost of
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expensive insertion. A Bytetrie is best used if it can be pre-filled with data.
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However, due to its in-band compression it can be also used for on-the-fly
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updates.
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## Keys
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Keys are byte strings. Therefore, each node in the trie can have up to 256
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children (the radix). Keys do work well with utf-8 and other encodings as long
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as the encoding is consistent and deterministic. That is, grapheme clusters
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are always encoded to the same byte sequence -- even if the standard allows for
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ambiguity. Usually that's a non-issue as long as the same encoder is used for
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insertion and lookup.
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Since prefix search in unicode strings is one of the most common use-cases of
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bytetrie, a unicode layer on top of bytetrie is [planned](TODO.md).
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## Data
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Bytetrie can associate arbitrary python objects with keys. Data (or rather a
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reference thereof) is kept in-tree. No further processing is done.
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In addition, bytrie allows multi-valued tries. Every key is then associated with
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a sequence of arbitrary objects.
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## Performance
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Despite being in pure python bytetrie is _fast_. Sifting through the full
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[geonames](http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/) "allCountries" dataset for
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places starting with `Vienna` takes a mere 512µs. That's not even a
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millisecond for searching through 12,041,359 places. For comparison, a warmed-up
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ripgrep search through the same dataset takes three orders of magnitude (400ms)
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longer on the same machine.
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On the downside, building the trie takes about 20 minutes and considerable
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memory. Also, the performance is mostly trumped by the time it takes to collect
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terminal nodes. The higher up the trie the search ends (and hence the more
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results the prefix search yields) the longer it takes. There are several
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low-hanging fruits left and further performance improvements are in the
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[pipeline](TODO.md).
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## Dependencies
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None. That's the point.
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# Getting started
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Install bytetrie via [pip](https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/quickstart/).
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```
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pip install -U bytetrie
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```
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The public interface is `ByteTrie` with the two methods `insert` and `find`.
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Find returns a list of `Terminals` from which the `key` and the `value` of the
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node can be retrieved.
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```python
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from bytetrie import ByteTrie
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t = ByteTrie(multi_value=True)
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t.insert(b"Hallo", "Dutch")
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t.insert(b"Hello", "English")
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t.insert(b"Hug", "Gaelic")
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t.insert(b"Hallo", "German")
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t.insert("Hē".encode("utf-8"), "Hindi")
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t.insert("Halló".encode("utf-8"), "Icelandic")
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t.insert(b"Hej", "Polish")
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t.insert(b"Hei", "Romanian")
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t.insert(b"Hujambo", "Swahili")
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t.insert(b"Hej", "Swedish")
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t.insert(b"Helo", "Welsh")
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print("Where to say 'Hi' with 'He'?")
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print(f"{[(n.key(), n.value()) for n in t.find(b'He')]}")
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# [(b'Hei', ['Romanian']), (b'Hej', ['Swedish', 'Polish']), (b'Helo', ['Welsh']), (b'Hello', ['English'])]
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print("Where to say 'Hi' with 'Ha'?")
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print(f"{[(n.key().decode(), n.value()) for n in t.find(b'Ha')]}")
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# [('Halló', ['Icelandic']), ('Hallo', ['German', 'Dutch'])]
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print("Where to say 'Hi' with 'Hē'?")
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print(f"Say 'Hi' with utf-8: {[(n.key().decode(), n.value()) for n in t.find('Hē'.encode())]}")
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# [('Hē', ['Hindi'])]
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```
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# Contribute
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If you want to contribute to `bytetrie` feel free to send patches to
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dev[at]friedl[dot]net. Alternatviely, you can issue a pull request on GitHub
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which will be cherry picked into my tree. If you plan significant long-term
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contributions drop me a mail for access to the incubator repository.
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# Github Users
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If you are visiting this repository on GitHub, you are on a mirror of
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https://git.friedl.net/incubator/bytetrie. This mirror is regularily updated
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with my other GitHub mirrors.
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Like with my other incubator projects, once I consider `bytetrie` reasonable
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stable the main tree will move to GitHub.
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