World: r3wp

A hash doens't allow me to do a wild card search

http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=like.rlets you do more 
than find/any, but you're still going to have the overhead of checking 
each string. Depending on your needs that may work, or you could 
make one big string out of them and just PARSE that.

find [ "ab" "bc" "bd" ] "b*"

looks like I should try and get a hash for each first letter, first 
and second letter etc so I can at least narrow it down to the first 
3 letters and then do search on everyone after that.

How many strings and what kind of performance do you need?

18,000 strings....  real time.... as each time they type a character 
I am presenting a list of choices

I am emulating this http://rxterms.nlm.nih.gov:8080/

have you thought about using SQLite?

I wonder how that would compare with doing REBOL lookups

I was just thinking that!

The example helps enormously Graham, because you said "first string" 
but now I see you want all matches for a given prefix.

once I get the first string .. then I can easily get the others as 
I sort the 18k strings first

is the existing sqlite driver work over the wire or does it do in 
process calls?

Maybe I need RIF

I've never used sqlite

I wonder if Ashley's rebdb would work ...

He doesn't have a like clause ... but I guess it could be faked

Graham, did you try REFORMing into a single string and using FIND/ANY? 
I did a quick test here and it's instant for me with 18K random "words" 
making a 200K string finding the last word (non-random for testing).

Hmmm, some of the terms aren't single words though.

In effect you've created an index

No, just a list of single-value records. :-)

Actually I wonder why find/any shouldn't work on series like these

Or you can say I created an index and the query system with two function 
calls.

You mean a block containing string values?

sure ..

>> help find
USAGE:

    FIND series value /part range /only /case /any /with wild /skip size 
    /match /tail /last /reverse

Doesn't say blocks are not included

But it's not find/deep, which is what you want.

for the /match refinement

Since it's a read only db, perhaps I could use Cyphre's compiler 
:)

Not sure how /match is going to help you here. It only matches the 
start of the series.

>> find/match ["Aa" "Bb" "Cc"] ["Bb"]
== none
>> find/match ["Aa" "Bb" "Cc"] ["Aa" "Bb"]
== ["Cc"]

ok... find/deep then :)

for 18k strings, it seems overkill to use sqlite though

REFORM + FIND/ANY

Just sayin'. ;-)

I'm sure that it is fast .. but I want real fast so I'm going to 
see if I can create a hash

Perhaps Sunanda's skimp.r may be hiding some gems you could adopt.

Graham -- consider using a Trie

[that is more-or-less what skimp.r does, but the skimp data structures 
are badly disorted as I was struggling to find a deeply-nested block 
structure that did not trigger garbage collection bugs in the then-current 
REBOL core. (those bugs have been fixed)]
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie

is there a port scheme for trie:// ?

Graham, look at the filter function in LIST-VIEW.

filter-list ?

no, FILTER.

sorry, FILTER-ROWS.

I guess it's been split in several parts now, so it may be too hard 
to read.

Graham, I did that recently, where you get choices as you type. I 
had ~1000 strings though, so not sure how much it scales. I just 
indexed by the first two characters.

It seems to be working not too bad for me without a hash .. but I'll 
need to test it on a slower PC ( test inside a VM I guess ) ...

video of my current implementation http://screencast.com/t/ZGI5ZTJkOTct

Very nice Graham! Thanks for posting. 

How did you end up doing the matching?

search each one from the start :)

rebol seems fast enough

Cool. Yeah, there are times we need to use advanced algorithms, and 
times we don't.