C++ What is the point (practical use) of Patricia Trie?

[grigorianvlad]

I am not clear on the whole purpose of a trie. Is it a compression mechanism for highly repetitive data where redundant strings are removed? Is it a data storage mechanism that provides less storage requirements at the expense of RAM calculations of trie links?
Lets consider this example. Suppose we have a text file 1GB in size. It contains partially repetitive lines (meaning each line is unique, but number or text sequences may be repeated at least partially on the following line).
Like:

1234585455458
12345094562233
1234000000001

1) Will trie help to store less data as opposed to the text file?
2) If so, what will be the difference in storage compression (lets say 30% of character sequences are repeated on different lines)?
3) What is the overhead of using a trie - it needs some additional characters to link the redundant entries which could be more than redundant entries themselves?
4) Is compression is significant enough to take this 1Gb text file, reprocess it as a trie and put it entirely into memory?
Thanks.

[Azagaros]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie
I would suggest looking at this. From what I read of the text, it is for speed and space in most applications of the ideas.

[grigorianvlad]

Thanks, Azagaros.