Find matching words in a database and a long string

Question

I have a large database of cities and towns (around 300 000) and I am trying -using python- to check if a given string contains one of these cities.

What is the optimal way to achieve this?

Answer 1

Though not the most optimal way to do it, but one way could be to split your long string into list of words. Then for each word query the database using LIKE regex. Eg: SELECT * FROM table WHERE city LIKE '%word%'