Search help

I do think that the quickiest way to do what you want IS brute force. Just loop through your words and at each loop test for the conditions. That would take time O(n).

I''m not sure if it could be done in time O(log n).

I think it can be done in O(log n) but i can''t waste memory cause it''s a huge set of data to search...

If that''s all you''ll ever need to search by, the ideal representation would be a hash table, with the hash function keyed on the first letter and the length. Then you''d just brute-force search the matching words. The runtime performance depends heavily on the nature of the datasets, but it should be close to O(1).

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"Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke

Sneftel: I''m not sure if a hash-table would help.
I want to be able to do this:

Search: a***e

And the result would be:
adore, aware, awake and so on.

I don''t understand how a hash-table would help me in this case. It would give me the starting letter and the length though...

(I''m really tired now, but tomorrow is another day.. )

So hold on. Your question seems to imply that you will always be searching by the first letter, some other letter in an arbitrary position, and the length. Is this not the case? I''m starting to think you''re writing a crossword/hangman solver.

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"Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke

Sneftel: The problem is the same. I just figured that if I would say that I was writing something that was really close to a crossword-solver, noone would help me.

If you are familiar with swedish cross-words you know that they are not to be beaten by I stupid program. In other countries besides sweden, the difficult cross-words are called swedish-crosswords... so?

For a situation like that, brute force is your only choice. Have the words in different containers, indexed by size, and search through the appropriate one.

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"Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke