org.apache.commons.collections4.Trie Maven / Gradle / Ivy
/*
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
* contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
* this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
* The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
* (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
* the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
package org.apache.commons.collections4;
import java.util.SortedMap;
/**
* Defines the interface for a prefix tree, an ordered tree data structure. For
* more information, see Tries.
*
* @param the type of the keys in this map
* @param the type of the values in this map
* @since 4.0
*/
public interface Trie extends IterableSortedMap {
/**
* Returns a view of this {@link Trie} of all elements that are prefixed
* by the given key.
*
* In a {@link Trie} with fixed size keys, this is essentially a
* {@link #get(Object)} operation.
*
* For example, if the {@link Trie} contains 'Anna', 'Anael',
* 'Analu', 'Andreas', 'Andrea', 'Andres', and 'Anatole', then
* a lookup of 'And' would return 'Andreas', 'Andrea', and 'Andres'.
*
* @param key the key used in the search
* @return a {@link SortedMap} view of this {@link Trie} with all elements whose
* key is prefixed by the search key
*/
SortedMap prefixMap(K key);
}