CODEWITHSUNDEEP
objective-ciosplist
eric.mitchell
eric.mitchell

Reputation: 8855

Search plist for integer

In an iOS app, I take a four digit code from the user and give them a corresponding string in a TextView. My question is, because there are about a thousand possible codes the user would enter that I am checking for, what is an efficient way to give a result without having a huge if or switch statement? Like, using a plist, txt file, or even database.... Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 0

Views: 285

Answers (2)

Chuck
Chuck

Reputation: 237070

The decision of plist, text file or database is just a matter of storage, not search. Personally, I would just use a JSON file, since it's reasonably well-supported both by the human brain and by software. For searching, just put them in an NSDictionary and do a lookup on that. Unless your items are very big, 1000 items is not really a large dataset, even on a memory-constrained iPhone. Even if each item is 1 KB (which sounds a lot larger than the dataset you're describing), you're looking at less than a megabyte for the whole set.

If the strings happen to be long, then store the long text in a file and store the file URL in your lookup table instead of the whole string. IIRC, a URL is about 100 bytes on average, and an NSNumber is about 8, so you'd be looking at about 108 KB for the entire dataset.

Upvotes: 1

Perception
Perception

Reputation: 80603

Given the number of possible codes I would recommend Core Data. Alternatively you can use SQLite directly. You could use a plist, but I fear it would quickly become unmanageable as you add, remove, and update codes.

Upvotes: 1

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