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 a very long string. 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 binary tree where each leaf node contains a short string. Each node has a weight value equal to the length of its string plus the sum of all leaf nodes' weight in its left subtree, namely the weight of a node is the total string length in its left subtree for a non-leaf node, or the string length of itself for a leaf node. Thus a node with two children divides the whole string into two parts: the left subtree stores the first part of the string. The right subtree stores the second part and its weight is the sum of the left child's weight and the length of its contained string.
The binary tree can be seen as several levels of nodes. The bottom level contains all the nodes that contain a string. Higher levels have fewer and fewer nodes. The top level consists of a single "root" node. The rope is built by putting the nodes with short strings in the bottom level, then attaching a random half of the nodes to parent nodes in the next level.
In the following definitions, N is the length of the rope.
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", is the answer.
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 O(log N) time, if the tree is balanced.
As most rope operations require balanced trees, the tree may need to be re-balanced after concatenation.
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