在大量字符串中搜索最匹配的最有效方法是什么？

Question

I have a large file (400K lines of English sentences) and need to be able to search and compare each sentence to an "input" string, which is also an English sentence. I'm not concerned of a memory footprint this application would have; I'm looking for the fastest way to do this. Currently, I have it stored as a large list of strings, and the program iterates through them all, one at a time, and compares the hamiltonian distance of each string - the one that "matches" is the one with the shortest distance. Is there something faster than this?

Answer 1

The best data structure to use here is a tree. Because in a tree, or even a search-trie (it is really written like "trie") the runtime is definitely smaller than that of a list. You could use the java implementation of TreeSet, or write yourself an own implementation of a tree. A search-trie or a prefix tree is a search tree, where every node of the tree is a character. A small example: you can find the image of the tree at the link https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmVCl.png

In this case, if you want to find/match the word "app", you need only 3 iterations in the whole tree-data structure. This is the most efficient way I know.