searching and hashtable question.

blackzone · 11-16-2004, 01:00 AM

I have a list of string: "apple, orange, banana...."

and a string "watermelon"

what is the most effective way to check if watermelon is in the list of string?

would hash table be an effective way to do it?

ToniT · 11-16-2004, 02:13 AM

If there are lots of strings there (eg. >100), hash would be quite good (O(1) when there is no collisions) ; there is some strorage and hash generating overhead, though.

But for huge amount of strings, I would use tries to store the data (try googling for trie).