The OP wrote in a reply to me:
"I don't need sort of matches, because my data has been designed such that my list of names exactly match the corresponding entries within the table (i.e. regex)."
I think one of the problems is that the OP is using terms like "regex" in ways that don't seem to make sense. I don't think that the OP really means "regex".

I am working on an approximate pattern matching problem currently. Right now I take an input, then generate a series of regex expressions that are or'd together. This indeed does work, but it is slow because that generated regex has to be compared against a large number of tokens. Right now I suspect that some sort of tree structure can be generated such that I can determine the approximate matches much, much faster. I absolutely know that this is true with a subset of my problem, something a bit more than N1. I am matching with a subset of N2. That subset of N2 being defined currently by my regex generator.

I have a colleague who is willing to look at the problem. I am working on a spec that is detailed enough so that he can understand what needs to be done without having to have any pre-knowledge of my application. That's more difficult than it sounds - the what's and why's are complex.

If anybody has experience with a similar sounding problem, send me a message.

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