Check if NSString contains a common first name on iPhone

I am wondering what the best approach would be to check whether or not a common first name is contained within an NSString on an iPhone app. I've got a sorted flat text file of ~5500 common American first names delimited by new lines. The 开发者_开发技巧NSString I am searching within for a name is not very long, most likely the size of a normal sentence.

My original plan was to load the sorted list into memory and then iterate over every word in the NSString performing a binary search of the list to determine whether or not that word was a common name.

Am I better off trying to put this name list into CoreData or a SQLite table and performing a query with that? My understanding is I would not have to load the entire list into memory if I went that route.

I am guessing this situation is a common problem with word dictionaries for word games, so I'm just wondering what the best practice is for fast lookups. Thanks!

SQLite sounds ideal for this in terms of both speed of lookup and minimising memory usage. It would also make it potentially possible to update the first name list over the internet if so desired.

Using Core Data (which is in effect an elabourate wrapper around SQLite) would be overkill in this instance, especially as you don't require the ORM like capabilities.

An NSSet might be useful as well. Dave DeLong's answer for another question demonstrates that NSSets have constant look-up times, i.e. O(1).

Load your names into an NSMutableSet one by one. This will be the slowest part but will only need to be done once. If your file is a simple line-delimited file of names, it may be easier to use the standard C library for reading the file, since line-by-line input is not well-supported by Cocoa.

After that, simply use [nameSet containsObject:name] to check whether it is in the list.

A couple of drawbacks to this approach:

1. The name you want to test must be in the same case as the name in the set, that is “paul” and “Paul” are different strings. You can circumvent this by converting all names to lowercase before inserting them into the set, and then also converting the name you want to check into lowercase before checking it against the set.
2. It might be easier just to go with the already-accepted answer.