Find dictionary items whose key matches a substring

Question

I have a large dictionary constructed like so:

programs[\'New York\'] = \'some values...\' 
programs[\'Port Authority of New York\'] = \'some values...\' 
pr         


        

Answer 1

This is usually called a relaxed dictionary and it can be implemented efficiently using a suffix tree.

The memory used by this approach is linear over the keys, which is optimal, and the time of search is linear over the substring length you are searching, which is also optimal.

I have found this library in python that implements this.

https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/suffix_trees/