In the case of your searches, I'd have to ask how many items you have, and how many of those items are subsets of items. (eg, if 'George' fails, there's no reason to test for 'George Bush' ... as the list gets larger, there's a better chance of this coming up) And even if they aren't in there directly, we may have other cheats. (no 'G' in the item? Well, then neither of the items will match... a simple test may be able to strip out large sections of your list)

Then we have the question of how many input strings you're searching, in relationship to the number of substrings. (if we're searching only one input string per invocation, we lose if we spend too much time trying to pre-process the list of substrings)

Also, what is the overall purpose, and does the order of the initial list matter? (for instance -- if we're using it in a switch() statement, once we've found the first match, we don't continue... but we need to make sure the list order doesn't change, or we'll potentially have inconsistent results if more than one list item matches)

In reply to Re: efficient method of matching a string against a list of substrings? by jhourcle
in thread efficient method of matching a string against a list of substrings? by diggler

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