[Info-vax] Looking for some text search ideas

[Michael Moroney]

Bill Pedersen <pedersen at ccsscorp.com> writes:

>A recent example was to search only for the leading letter of the 
>string.  On match then check the character at the position of the last 
>letter in desired srting for a match, if not match continue with 
>comparison search for first letter of string at position after the last 
>letter failed.  This has been shown to speed up the searches.

I've seen that search, not quite like that but the location and value of
the mismatch determined how many characters to skip.  More efficient with
long search strings.  I believe NOTES uses that algorithm.

Anyway, to the OP, does the value being search appear anywhere or only
as a portion of a key (your "head gasket" example) ?  If only in the key,
can you make a parallel file with only the keys and search that smaller 
file?