You cannot get a string out of automaton by its ordinal without storing additional data. The string is stored there not as a single arc, but as a sequence of them (basically.. err.. as a string), so referencing them is basically writing the string asis. Space savings here come from sharing arcs between strings.

Though, it's possible to do if you associate an additional number with each node. (I invented some way, shared it with Mike and forgot.. good grief :/)

Perfect hashing, on the other hand, is like a Map<String, Integer> that accepts a predefined set of N strings and returns an int in 0..N-1 interval. And it can't do the reverse lookup, by design, that's a lossy compression for all good perfect hashing algos. So, it's irrelevant here, huh?

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 08:53, David Smiley (@MITRE.org) <DSMI...@mitre.org> wrote: