[python] How to create a trie in Python

Have a look at this:

https://github.com/kmike/marisa-trie

Static memory-efficient Trie structures for Python (2.x and 3.x).

String data in a MARISA-trie may take up to 50x-100x less memory than in a standard Python dict; the raw lookup speed is comparable; trie also provides fast advanced methods like prefix search.

Based on marisa-trie C++ library.

Here's a blog post from a company using marisa trie successfully:
https://www.repustate.com/blog/sharing-large-data-structure-across-processes-python/

At Repustate, much of our data models we use in our text analysis can be represented as simple key-value pairs, or dictionaries in Python lingo. In our particular case, our dictionaries are massive, a few hundred MB each, and they need to be accessed constantly. In fact for a given HTTP request, 4 or 5 models might be accessed, each doing 20-30 lookups. So the problem we face is how do we keep things fast for the client as well as light as possible for the server.

...

I found this package, marisa tries, which is a Python wrapper around a C++ implementation of a marisa trie. “Marisa” is an acronym for Matching Algorithm with Recursively Implemented StorAge. What’s great about marisa tries is the storage mechanism really shrinks how much memory you need. The author of the Python plugin claimed 50-100X reduction in size – our experience is similar.

What’s great about the marisa trie package is that the underlying trie structure can be written to disk and then read in via a memory mapped object. With a memory mapped marisa trie, all of our requirements are now met. Our server’s memory usage went down dramatically, by about 40%, and our performance was unchanged from when we used Python’s dictionary implementation.

There are also a couple of pure-python implementations, though unless you're on a restricted platform you'd want to use the C++ backed implementation above for best performance: