how to make a keyword searchable hash function/table

[psychocowtipper]

I need to, upon receiving an input file with strings of song names, be able to create a hash table of them that is searchable by keywords.

ie. if my input file is

file 1: artist= "The Beatles", title= "All I Need Is Love (Live)"
file 2: artist= "The Beatles", title= "Help! (Live)"
file 3: artist= "The Beatles", title= "Yellow Submarine"

I would need to hash these three to a table and upon searching for

(Live): return file 1 and file 2
Beatles: return file 1, file 2, and file 3
Help!: return file 2

What would be the best way of going about this? I can think of a way to hash them all so that they are searchable in O(1) time if I search for their full name, but I cant think of a way in which every word contained in each line can be used to find the song also.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Psychocowtipper

[Rambetter]

You're asking about an advanced algorithm. Your question is not really related to C++ per se.
Anyhow, a naive approach of implementing your text search functionality would be to have a multi hash map which has as keys the individual words from song titles and as values a pointer (or some kind of reference) to the full song. Something along those lines. You'd probably want to allow for case-insensitive searches, however, Why don't you break into Google's offices and steal their code to do it?

[choisum]

I think you need to extract each individual word from the title and store the words.

[PanGalactic]

One could do this using a std::multimap with each word and phrase in artist and title as a key.

[Rambetter]

If you want your searches to be case-insensitive, store the keyword keys in your multimap as all lowercase or all uppercase, and when you do a search for a word, convert that word to that case.