On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:55:10 +0100, Tor Erik Sønvisen wrote: > Hi > > I need a time and space efficient way of storing up to 6 million bits.
[inserts pinky in corner of mouth] Six MILLION bits!!! That's almost 750K. Are you sure your computer will handle that much data? > Time > efficency is more important then space efficency as I'm going to do searches > through the bit-set. Could you be more vague if you tried? Searching for what? Does your data have structure you can exploit? Can you put it in a tree structure? Are you going to be inserting and deleting data? If you can handle your six million bits in lots of eight, store them as a character string. If you can keep your data sorted, then you can do binary searches instead of linear searches. If your data is hashable, you can store it in a dictionary and potentially get up to constant-time search speeds. Or forget about manipulating bits, and just store your data as bools in a list. Explain your problem a little better, and you may get some better advice. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
