🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <44prsv$ki7@news.netvision.net.il>, galor@netvision.net.il (Guy Naor) says:


>I'm looking for the best (fastest) way for finding the first occurence
>of a string in a sorted array, when entries aren't unique. For
>example:
>
>an array containing: AA,AB,AC,AD,BB,BB,BB,BC,BF,CG,CG,CT
>I want to find the first occurance of BB. 
>

Why not compress the data?
Your sorted array is an array of structures like this:

data
{
	int frequency;
	char item[2];
}

or	"chars" AA,AB,AC,AD,BB,BC,BF,CG,CT 
	"freqs"  1  1  1  1  3  1  1  2  1

so any occurance of "BB" is the first!
you might of course blow any speed advantage gained this way by the
compression, but this will depend on your problem.

And you will want to add >> and << operators to compress/expand the 
array of course.

good luck,
frithiof jensen.

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