Suggest you look into using height-balanced binary trees, called AVL trees. You can have more than 1 successor, but at least it will be maintained in some height-balanced order so that it doesn't take forever to find it.

hi, i need help with creating a tree in c, in fact, there should be more than one and i'm not sure how to write it, i have to use data structures because classical arrays are less effective and take more memory, the problem is that i have to scan few words from standard input and save them in some structure i assume, and then look if there up to 1000 words with the same prefix like abcdef and abcxyz and count how many letters they have the same, in this case it would print "3" and i thought i would make a tree and get letters from words and if they are the same i would give them to one tree but i really dont know how to write it in code, can somebody help me? even some good pseudocode could really help, thank you