Maybe you could build a (sorted) tree and do the search "manually", ie without regexes?

Even if you only build one file for each possible first character you gain a factor of 26 (if you reduce it to latin alphabet).

Perl 6 in German -- Difficult Sudoku

In reply to Re^2: parsing a very large array with regexps by moritz
in thread parsing a very large array with regexps by pc2

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