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startsWith datastructure

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Lets say you had a list of book publishers and the block of ISBN
numbers they own. e.g. Prentice-Hall owns all isbns of the form
013XXXXXXXXXX,
or put another way, own all ISBNs that startsWith "013".
Some publishers such as O'Reilly own multiple blocks.

     013, Prentice Hall
     014, Penguin
    0201, Addison-Wesley
    0393, H. W. Norton
    0471, John Wiley & Sons
    0553, Bantam
  059600, O'Reilly
  156592, O'Reilly
    0060, Harper
   06723, Sams
   07356, Microsoft Press
   07432, Simon & Schuster
   07710, McClelland & Stewart
   08125, Tor
  086571, New Society Publishers
 0915972, Love Line
15795106, Ronin Publishing

etc.

Your list is incomplete. It has only the major publishers.

The problem is, given an ISBN, can you make at guess at its publisher?

What sort of  datastructure/lookup mechanism would you use?

Obviously, you could just do a linear search looking for a match, and
unless the list got very long, that should suffice,  but, just for
fun, say you wanted something faster, what would you do?

This is just an example of a class of problem I wanted to write a
little essay on for the Java glossary with possible solutions.
-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
There are four possible ways to poke a card into a slot.
Nearly always, only one way works. To me that betrays a 
Fascist mentality, demanding customers conform to some 
arbitrary rule, and hassling them to discover the magic 
orientation. The polite way to do it is to design the reader 
slot so that all four ways work, or so that all the customer 
has to do is put the card in the vicinity of the reader. 

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startsWith datastructure Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2012-10-27 03:50 -0700
  Re: startsWith datastructure Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2012-10-27 04:13 -0700
  Re: startsWith datastructure "Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> - 2012-10-27 12:50 +0100
  Re: startsWith datastructure Robert Klemme <shortcutter@googlemail.com> - 2012-10-27 13:56 +0200

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