search List for string .StartsWith()

Question

I have a

List

with 1500 strings. I am now using the following code to pull out only string that start with the string prefix

Answer 1

Thus 1500 is not really a huge number binary search on sorted list would be enough probably. Nevertheless most efficient algorithms for prefix search are based on the data structure named Trie or Prefix Tree. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie

Following picture demonstrates the idea very briefly:

For c# implementation see for instance .NET DATA STRUCTURES FOR PREFIX STRING SEARCH AND SUBSTRING (INFIX) SEARCH TO IMPLEMENT AUTO-COMPLETION AND INTELLI-SENSE