In
computer science, a
radix tree (also
radix trie or
compact prefix tree) is a
data structure that represents a space-optimized
trie in which each node that is the only child is merged with its parent. The result is that the number of children of every internal node is at least the
radix of the radix trie, where is a positive integer and a power of 2, having = 1. Unlike in regular tries, edges can be labeled with sequences of elements as well as single elements. This makes radix trees much more efficient for small sets (especially if the strings are long) and for sets of strings that share long prefixes.