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reduction

Ian Kelly ian.g.kelly at gmail.com
Tue May 31 10:35:23 EDT 2016 
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 8:22 AM, Fillmore <fillmore_remove at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> My problem. I have lists of substrings associated to values:
>
> ['a','b','c','g'] => 1
> ['a','b','c','h'] => 1
> ['a','b','c','i'] => 1
> ['a','b','c','j'] => 1
> ['a','b','c','k'] => 1
> ['a','b','c','l'] => 0  # <- Black sheep!!!
> ['a','b','c','m'] => 1
> ['a','b','c','n'] => 1
> ['a','b','c','o'] => 1
> ['a','b','c','p'] => 1
>
> I can check a bit of data against elements in this list
> and determine whether the value to be associated to the data is 1 or 0.
>
> I would like to make my matching algorithm smarter so I can
> reduce the total number of lists:
>
> ['a','b','c','l'] => 0  # If "l" is in my data I have a zero
> ['a','b','c'] => 1      # or a more generic match will do the job
>
> I am trying to think of a way to perform this "reduction", but
> I have a feeling I am reinventing the wheel.
>
> Is this a common problem that is already addressed by an existing module?

Sounds like you probably want a trie data structure. You can google
for Python implementations.
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