RE: Visual Basic 6 File Sorting
- From: "Sina Bahram" <sbahram@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 10:49:59 -0400
If you want to store it in alphabetical order, then bubble sort is
litterally the worst possible thing you could do, as that takes n^2 time and
is quite slow for lots of elements.
Sort the elements, using something like quicksort, merge sort, or heap sort.
Then store them in a file in that sorted way, litterally one after another.
This way, you can use a binary search to quickly access any element in
log(n) time.
So, if you have the words
Apple
Baby
Banana
Cat
Dog
Elephant
Zebra
And you're looking to see if the word dog is in your list, all you have to
do is:
Take the mid point, which is cat, and see if dog is before or after cat.
It's after, so then take the midpoint of the remaining, which is elephant,
and see if dog is before or after elephant, and it's before, so then take
the midpoint of cat and elephant, which is dog, and bam, you're done.
Notice how we only really examined three words to find a word in a list of
7, which is less than half of the list, and this benefit scales beautifully
with larger and larger lists. Also, it's very fast to do because all you
have to do is a few very simplistic calculations over and over again in a
loop, and bam you're done.
Anyways, I hope this helps a bit.
It's important to note that you shouldn't do any of this if you don't have
to; for example, if vb6 offers some sort of hash structure than you can
simply use, and then all you have to do is write out and read back in the
hash.
Take care,
Sina
-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steven Hicks
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 8:50 AM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Visual Basic 6 File Sorting
Hello friends,
tricky question here, not sure if anyone can point me in the right
direction? I have a random access file which I would like to sort in to
alphabetical order, does anyone know where I could make a start from here?
Would I need to load all the entries in to an eray then sort them or even
perform some sort of bubble sort (remembered from my college days :-).
Many thanks in anticipation for any help.
Steve.
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