Efficient String Lookup?

[Chris S.]

Bengt Richter wrote:

> On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 05:50:49 GMT, "Chris S." <chrisks at NOSPAM.udel.edu> wrote:
>>Sorry for the ambiguity. My case is actually pretty simple. '#' 
>>represents any single character, so it's essentially the same as re's 
>>'.'. The match must be exact, so the string and pattern must be of equal 
>>lengths. Each wildcard is independent of other wildcards. For example, 
>>suppose we restricted the possible characters to 1 and 0, then the 
>>pattern '##' would only match '00', '01', '10', and '11'. This pattern 
>>would not match '0', '111', etc. I feel that a trie would work well, but 
>>I'm concerned that for large patterns, the overhead in the Python 
>>implementation would be too inefficient.
> 
> 
> So is the set of patterns static and you want to find which pattern(s!)
> match dynamic input? How many patterns vs inputs strings? What max
> length patterns, input strings? Total volume?

Patterns and inputs are dynamic, input more so than patterns. The 
number, length, and volume of patterns and strings should be arbitrary.