Hi rjohn1,

I should probably add that what I said about algorithms mapping strings to 32-bit numbers applies to hashing/checksumming functions. There may be other algorithms or data structures that could be used to check incoming strings for matches against an existing set of strings (like a tree structure, maybe trie), but that's not my area of expertise. But I'd still try Perl's hashes first, at the very least to get a quick prototype implementation or a baseline, but it may very well turn out they'll be good enough for you.

Regards,
-- Hauke D