Hi there,

I need to match a series of user inputed words against a large dictionary of words (to ensure the entered value exists).

So if the user entered:

"orange" it should match an entry "orange' in the dictionary.

Now the catch is that the user can also enter a wildcard or series of wildcard characters like say

"or__ge" which would also match "orange"

The key requirements are:

* this should be as fast as possible.

* use the smallest amount of memory to achieve it.  

If the size of the word list was small I could use a string containing all the words and use regular expressions.

however given that the word list could contain potentially hundreds of thousands of enteries I'm assuming this wouldn't work.

So is some sort of 'tree' be the way to go for this...?

Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be totally appreciated!

Thanks in advance, Matt