I don't consider an array of about 275,000 items to be that big; "big" is on the order of millions, not a couple of hundred thousand.

You need to provide some more information, such as are the words expected to be unique, are your searches case-insensitive, are regexen required, how often does this need to be done, etc. I seem to remember Jon Bentley did something akin to this in his book, Programming Pearls. I believe he was building a word list for a spell-checker. I can't remember the exact form of the data structure he used, so I'm not going into further detail.

fixed markup

emc

Information about American English usage here and here.

Any New York City or Connecticut area jobs? I'm currently unemployed.

In reply to Re: parsing a very large array with regexps by swampyankee
in thread parsing a very large array with regexps by pc2

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