Apps Fast skipping into text asset

[euclidean]

Hey, so, I'm working on a word game for Android and I'm currently trying to optimize my word validation code.

There are something like 270,000 words in the English language and I need to be able to take a user-inputted word and confirm it is in this list very quickly. My goal is under 50ms.

I've written a structure that indexes this list first by number of letters, then by first letter, then by every fiftieth word.

My problem is that after I do this to get the number of bytes to skip in the appropriate word list text file, I call skip(int bytes) on my BufferedReader. Using the Android tracer, I can see that this call takes up 99.7% of the time spent validating a word - up to about 2 seconds in a worst case search. I figure this method is implemented by calling skip(), <bytes> times.

So I am looking for a way to skip into an asset stream in constant time, like simply moving the read pointer by a specified number of bytes without actually reading.

Is this even possible, or should I write a script that divides my word lists up into very small files with 50-100 words each?

Thanks.

 

[Deleted User]

I don't think you need to drop the file size down that small, but it would make sense to split it into several files so you're not having to skip a megabyte just to find the word you're looking for. Splitting this into ten files should give you a pretty big performance increase, but you can tweak the number to what works best for you.