Way to store a large dictionary with low memory footprint + fast lookups (on Android)
- by BobbyJim
I'm developing an android word game app that needs a large (~250,000 word dictionary) available. I need:
reasonably fast look ups e.g. constant time preferable, need to do maybe 200 lookups a second on occasion to solve a word puzzle and maybe 20 lookups within 0.2 second more often to check words the user just spelled.
EDIT: Lookups are typically asking "Is in the dictionary?". I'd like to support up to two wildcards in the word as well, but this is easy enough by just generating all possible letters the wildcards could have been and checking the generated words (i.e. 26 * 26 lookups for a word with two wildcards).
as it's a mobile app, using as little memory as possible and requiring only a small initial download for the dictionary data is top priority.
My first naive attempts used Java's HashMap class, which caused an out of memory exception. I've looked into using the SQL lite databases available on android, but this seems like overkill.
What's a good way to do what I need?
