As we know, in the tree the pointers to the children elements are usually implemented with a left and right variable, because the maximum fan-out is fixed at two.
In a trie indexing an alphabet of 26 letters, each node has 26 possible children and, therefore, 26 possible pointers. Each node thus features an array of 26 (pointers to) sub-trees, where each value could either be null (if there is no such child) or another node.
How, then, do we look-up a word in a trie? Here is the method that, given a String s, will identify the node that corresponds to the last letter of the word, if it exists in the tree: