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

A special case of this problem came up in the 70s AI languages oriented around deductive databases. The keys in these databases could be patterns with variables -- like regular expressions without the * or | operators. They tended to use fancy extensions of trie structures for indexes. See krep*.lisp in Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming for the general idea.