Not sure if this is what Thomas meant, but I was also thinking dictionaries.
Dino could build a set of dictionaries with keys “a” through “z” that contain data with those letters in them. (I’m assuming case insensitive search) and then just search “v” if that’s what the user starts with. Increased performance may be achieved by building dictionaries “aa”,”ab” ... “zz. And so on. Of course, it’s trading CPU for memory usage, and there’s likely a point at which the cost of building dictionaries exceeds the savings in searching. From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+gweatherby=uchc....@python.org> on behalf of Thomas Passin <li...@tompassin.net> Date: Sunday, March 5, 2023 at 9:07 PM To: python-list@python.org <python-list@python.org> Subject: Re: Fast full-text searching in Python (job for Whoosh?) I would probably ingest the data at startup into a dictionary - or perhaps several depending on your access patterns - and then you will only need to to a fast lookup in one or more dictionaries. If your access pattern would be easier with SQL queries, load the data into an SQLite database on startup. IOW, do the bulk of the work once at startup. -- https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list__;!!Cn_UX_p3!lnP5Hxid5mAgwg8o141SvmHPgCBU8zEaHDgukrQm2igozg5H5XLoIkAmrsHtRbZHR68oYAQpRFPh-Z9telM$<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list__;!!Cn_UX_p3!lnP5Hxid5mAgwg8o141SvmHPgCBU8zEaHDgukrQm2igozg5H5XLoIkAmrsHtRbZHR68oYAQpRFPh-Z9telM$> -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
