hi larry... thanks for the reply...
the issue i'm having is that i'm going to have to compare multiple rows of information to the information in the db. so essentially i'd have to do a hit to the db, for each row of information i want to compare if i did it your way... (which was what i had thought about) the issue of doing the string/list compare/search is that i can get everything from the db with one call... i can then iterate through memory for each of my row information that i'm searching to see if it exists in the db... memory searches should be faster than the network overhead, and the associated multiple db calls... -bruce -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Larry Bates Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 4:28 PM To: python-list@python.org Subject: Re: seaching a list... bruce wrote: > hi... > > i'm playing with a test sample. i have somethhing like: > dog = mysql_get(.....) > . > . > . > > such that 'dog' will be an 'AxB' array of data from the tbls > > furher in the test app, i'm going to have a list, foo: > foo = 'a','b','c','d' > > i'm trying to determine what's the fastest way of searching through the > 'dog' array/list of information for the 'foo' list. > > should i essentially make dog into A lists, where each list is B elements, > or should it somehow combine all the elements/items in 'dog' into one large > list, and then search through that for the 'foo' list... > > also, in searching through google, i haven't come across the list.search > function.. so just how do i search a list to see if it contains a sublist... > > my real problem involves figuring out how to reduce the number of hits to > the db/tbl... > > thanks > > ps. if this is confusing, i could provide psuedo-code to make it easier to > see... > > > > You should use the database for what it is good at storing and searching through data. Don't read all the data from a table and search through it. Rather, create indexes on the table so that you can locate the data quickly in the database by passing in something you are looking for and let the database do the searching. I can promise you this will almost always be faster and more flexible. Something like: Assume the columns are called rownumber, c1, c2, c3, c4 and the table is indexed on c1, c2, c3, and c4. This will happen almost instantly no matter how many rows you are searching for. select rownumber from database_table where c1="a" and c2="b" and c3="c" and c5="d" It takes one "hit" to the db/table to return the rowindex that matches. -Larry Bates -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
