Hashtable/dictionary/map lookup with regular expressions

Question

I\'m trying to figure out if there\'s a reasonably efficient way to perform a lookup in a dictionary (or a hash, or a map, or whatever your favorite language calls it) where the

Answer 1

This is definitely possible, as long as you're using 'real' regular expressions. A textbook regular expression is something that can be recognized by a deterministic finite state machine, which primarily means you can't have back-references in there.

There's a property of regular languages that "the union of two regular languages is regular", meaning that you can recognize an arbitrary number of regular expressions at once with a single state machine. The state machine runs in O(1) time with respect to the number of expressions (it runs in O(n) time with respect to the length of the input string, but hash tables do too).

Once the state machine completes you'll know which expressions matched, and from there it's easy to look up values in O(1) time.