A Suffix Trie and a Suffix Tree are both data structures used to efficiently store and search for substrings within a given string, but they differ significantly in structure and efficiency. A Suffix Trie is a simple tree-like structure where each path from the root to a leaf node represents a suffix of the string. This results in a potentially high memory usage, as it may contain many redundant nodes, particularly in cases with long strings that share common suffixes. In contrast, a Suffix Tree is a compressed version of a Suffix Trie, where common prefixes are merged into single nodes, leading to a more compact representation.
While both structures allow for efficient substring searches in linear time, the Suffix Tree typically uses less memory and can support more advanced operations, such as finding the longest repeated substring or the longest common substring between two strings. However, building a Suffix Tree is more complex and takes time, while constructing a Suffix Trie is easier but can take , where is the number of unique characters in the string.
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