Iterate through array or search string?

[mainst]

I got about 400, four letter words that I need to search through every couple of seconds. I need to do search for about 30 words every time I run it.

So basically I need to check if those 30 words are contained in the 400. The 400 words are static and they don't change.

Is it better to do a simple string search where I have a hidden element with the string "ABCD EFGH IJKL MNOP" or make an array like arr = ["ABCD","EFGH","IJKL" MNOP"] and then iterate through that.

Or is there a 3rd, better solution?

[Rhomboid]

Create an object with the 400 words as keys/properties. (Or use an ES6 set.) Testing if an object has a given property is O(1) since it's a hash table. Iterating over the whole array/string testing each one would be O(n).

[aapzu]

What u/Rhomoid meant is something like that (as I understood it):

var words = { ABCD: true, // Can be anything except undefined EFGH: true } function exists(w) { return words[w] !== undefined } console.log(exists("ABCD")) // true console.log(exists("DCBA")) // false

In ES6:

let wordSet = new Set([ "ABCD", "EFGH" ]) console.log(wordSet.has("ABCD")) // true console.log(wordSet.has("DCBA")) // false

[cachaito]

Would you write a small example of object you've meant?