most efficient way to find partial string matches in large file of strings (python)

Question

I downloaded the Wikipedia article titles file which contains the name of every Wikipedia article. I need to search for all the article titles that may be a possible match.

Answer 1

Greg's answer is good if you want to match on individual words. If you want to match on substrings you'll need something a bit more complicated, like a suffix tree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_tree). Once constructed, a suffix tree can efficiently answer queries for arbitrary substrings, so in your example it could match "Ice_Hockey" when someone searched for "hock".