Question

Well I’m making a small phone book application and I’ve decided that using maps would be the best data structure to use but I don’t know where to start. (Gotta implement the data structure from scratch – school work)

Answer 1

Tries are quite efficient for implementing maps where the keys are short strings. The wikipedia article explains it pretty well.

To deal with duplicates, just make each node of the tree store a linked list of duplicate matches

Here’s a basic structure for a trie

struct Trie {
   struct Trie* letter;
   struct List *matches;
};

malloc(26*sizeof(struct Trie)) for letter and you have an array. if you want to support punctuations, add them at the end of the letter array.

matches can be a linked list of matches, implemented however you like, I won’t define struct List for you.