Lyle Kopnicky
If you have some other metric other than prefix in mind for partial matches, then things probably get a lot more complicated. You're probably looking at calculating minimum distances in some feature-space, which calls for pretty sophisticated algorithms if you need good performance.
Yes, that's the kind of thing I'm looking at doing. Looking at edit distance.
Do you really need that to search for movie titles? At any rate, an exact-match finite-map implementation is a good start - to get good performance, you probably will need to use some kind of index to reduce the amount of data to search exhaustively (all-against-all). For text searching I think it is effective to use an index that maps from words (so that looking up a word gives you all the movies with that word in the title). -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants