title: How to quickly find matching strings?
body: <p>I'm using Lua -- just an FYI, so after 10^10 digits, comparisons become invalid IIRC.</p>
  
  <p>I have a list of 50,000 names -- that list may even increase into the hundreds of thousands. I'm trying to achieve displaying a list of potential matches for partial names typed in the search bar, so if I typed "And", these might pop up:</p>
  
  <p>"Andy"
  "Andrew"
  "Andre"
  etc up to 20 matches at a time.</p>
  
  <p>Each name is unique -- there are no to that are exactly the same. Names can contain letters, digits, spaces, and periods. The table/array of these names is not sorted in any fashion when the code is run. In Lua, how can I, if it's even possible, display real-time potential matches when a user types a name into the search bar?</p>