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Rope (data structure)

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Rope (data structure)

In computer programming, a rope, or cord, is a data structure composed of smaller strings that is used to efficiently store and manipulate longer strings or entire texts. For example, a text editing program may use a rope to represent the text being edited, so that operations such as insertion, deletion, and random access can be done efficiently.

A rope is a type of binary tree where each leaf (end node) holds a string of manageable size and length (also known as a weight), and each node further up the tree holds the sum of the lengths of all the leaves in its left subtree. A node with two children thus divides the whole string into two parts: the left subtree stores the first part of the string, the right subtree stores the second part of the string, and a node's weight is the length of the first part.

For rope operations, the strings stored in nodes are assumed to be constant immutable objects in the typical nondestructive case, allowing for some copy-on-write behavior. Leaf nodes are usually implemented as basic fixed-length strings with a reference count attached for deallocation when no longer needed, although other garbage collection methods can be used as well.

In the following definitions, N is the length of the rope, that is, the weight of the root node. These examples are defined in the Java programming language.

This operation can be done by a Split() and two Concat() operations. The cost is the sum of the three.

To retrieve the i-th character, we begin a recursive search from the root node:

For example, to find the character at i=10 in Figure 2.1 shown on the right, start at the root node (A), find that 22 is greater than 10 and there is a left child, so go to the left child (B). 9 is less than 10, so subtract 9 from 10 (leaving i=1) and go to the right child (D). Then because 6 is greater than 1 and there's a left child, go to the left child (G). 2 is greater than 1 and there's a left child, so go to the left child again (J). Finally 2 is greater than 1 but there is no left child, so the character at index 1 of the short string "na" (ie "n") is the answer. (1-based index)

A concatenation can be performed simply by creating a new root node with left = S1 and right = S2, which is constant time. The weight of the parent node is set to the length of the left child S1, which would take time, if the tree is balanced.

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