CentralNotice From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search An example of a radix tree In computer science , a radix tree (also patricia trie , radix trie or compact prefix tree ) is a data structure that represents a space-optimized trie in which each node with only one child is merged with its child. The result is that every internal node has up to the number of children of the radix r of the radix trie, where r is a positive integer and a power x of 2, having x ≥ 1. Unlike in regular tries, edges can be labeled with sequences of elements as well as single elements. This makes them much more efficient for small sets (especially if the strings are long) and for sets of strings that share long prefixes. Unlike regular trees (where whole keys are compared en masse from their beginning up to the point of inequality), the key at each node is com...