NAME
    Text::Scan - Fast search for very large numbers of keys in a body of
    text.

SYNOPSIS
            use Text::Scan;

            $dict = new Text::Scan;

            %terms = ( dog  => 'canine',
                       bear => 'ursine',
                       pig  => 'porcine' );

            # load the dictionary with keys and values
            # (values can be any scalar, keys must be strings)
            while ($key, $val) = each %terms ){
                    $dict->insert( $key, $val );
            }

            # Scan a document for matches
            %found = $dict->scan( $document );

            # Or, if you need to count number of occurrences of any given 
            # key, use an array. This will give you a countable flat list
            # of key => value pairs.
            @found = $dict->scan( $document );

            # Check for membership ($val is true)
            $val = $dict->has('pig');

            # Retrieve all keys
            @keys = $dict->keys();

DESCRIPTION
    This module provides facilities for fast searching on arbitrarily long
    texts with arbitrarily many search keys. The basic object behaves
    somewhat like a perl hash, except that you can retrieve based on a
    superstring of any keys stored. Simply scan a string as shown above and
    you will get back a perl hash (or list) of all keys found in the string
    (along with associated values). Longest-first order is observed (as in
    perl regular expressions).

CREDITS
    Except for the actual scanning part, plus the node-rotation for
    self-adjusting optimization, this code is heavily borrowed from both
    Bentley & Sedgwick and Leon Brocard's additions to it for
    `Tree::Ternary_XS'. The C code interface was created using Ingerson's
    `Inline'.

    Many test scripts come directly from Rogaski's `Tree::Ternary' module.

SEE ALSO
    `Bentley & Sedgwick "Fast Algorithms for Sorting and Searching Strings",
    Proceedings ACM-SIAM (1997)'

    `Bentley & Sedgewick "Ternary Search Trees", Dr Dobbs Journal (1998)'

    `Sleator & Tarjan "Self-Adjusting Binary Search Trees", Journal of the
    ACM (1985)'

    `Tree::Ternary'

    `Tree::Ternary_XS'

COPYRIGHT
    Copyright 2001 Ira Woodhead, H5 Technologies. All rights reserved.

    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the same terms as Perl itself

AUTHOR
    Ira Woodhead, bunghole@pobox.com