capillary

Library for HashMap-like storage of key-value pairs, but allowing for step-by-step (partial) search of value.

Internally it uses an implementation of a tree. This makes it possible to search for a value by providing partial steps.

Use case

One use case, that served as inspiration to create this crate, is replacement inside of a string.

For example, we might want to replace all occurances of keys with their values. Naive and inefficient way is to iterate over keys and call string.replace for every key.

The idea behind capillary is to iterate over string once and be able to replace all occurances in a linear manner. Any character can lead either to a valid, or invalid state. That way, part of the key can be used to go towards some (potential) values. As soon as one unique value is reached, it can be returned.