Are you saying that new strings are to be added once the sorted set is already inserted via serial communication? If strings are to be dynamically added to a pre-existing pre-sorted set, its a very different problem. Indexing might not be the best solution unless you can afford to reserve some extra-space for each alphabet in the index, and again there is the question of how much space to reserve.

A dynamic allocation like linked list method would be better. Hash tables somehow seem a bit complicated to implement on a 8-bit, especially when you consider collisions. An indexed linked-list might be a good idea, and should be easy to implement too.

And as Erik has mentioned, the nature of the string and matching criteria are important, and if you could ellucidate about those, it would help us understand the problem better...

kundi