Software Engineering

Autocomplete relies on data structures that can find words by prefix efficiently. This article compares tries and ternary search trees and shows how to implement both approaches in C++.

How Prefix-Based Autocomplete Works

Autocomplete is the feature when an application predicts the complete word, after just typing some prefix of the word. You must have used autocomplete feature a lot in your life in many area like:

• Search engines, Google search engine suggests to you an autocomplete feature when you type some text in the search bar, usually sorted by most trends.
• Emails, as you start writing some prefix of the Email address you will get a list of suggestions.
• Social media, like facebook, linkedin, instagram…
• In source code editors, actually I am using Atom right now and I have used autocomplete for at least 10 times just in the first small part of this article.

Read more →

Autocomplete relies on data structures that can find words by prefix efficiently. This article compares tries and ternary search trees and shows how to implement both approaches in C++.

How Prefix-Based Autocomplete Works

Autocomplete is the feature when an application predicts the complete word, after just typing some prefix of the word. You must have used autocomplete feature a lot in your life in many area like:

• Search engines, Google search engine suggests to you an autocomplete feature when you type some text in the search bar, usually sorted by most trends.
• Emails, as you start writing some prefix of the Email address you will get a list of suggestions.
• Social media, like facebook, linkedin, instagram…
• In source code editors, actually I am using Atom right now and I have used autocomplete for at least 10 times just in the first small part of this article.

Read more →