On Fri, 19 Apr 1996, Adam Shostack wrote:
Does anyone have some code that will search a dictionary, and tell me *quickly* if an arbitrary chunk of text is in the dictionary? Pre-indexing steps are fine, as is using big chunks of disk for hash tables. The point of course, is to check arbitrary possible plaintext that a test decryption produces.
You could try using isite (see http://www.cnidr.org/), which is a pretty cool search engine, and should work well enough, and the patrie structure could make restarts really fast . The real answer to your question depends almost entirely on the machine you wish to run it on- is memory not a problem? If so, tries may be your best bet, though you may have bad cache interactions. Otherwise, you might be best going for a probabalistic approach and using hash table to elimate definite non-matches, then an AVL-Tree or similar for confirmation. If you just use a single bit for each hash-table datum, you can afford to make the table pretty sparse Simon --- They say in online country So which side are you on boys There is no middle way Which side are you on You'll either be a Usenet man Which side are you on boys Or a thug for the CDA Which side are you on? National Union of Computer Operatives; Hackers, local 37 APL-CPIO