Bravo.
Most xTalk binary search algos depend on line-counting, which still
requires considerable under-the-hood effort as the engine needs to
traverse chunks to count CRs, over and over again.
Your byte-based algo us much better - thanks for posting that.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
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Alex Tweedly wrote:
So I went back, did the thinking, eliminated kBrute (and thankfully the
need for an unnecessary assumption/requirement to limit line length). I
also changed it so that when we are about to test, we always have a
complete line identified - and so it is much easier to adapt the code
for other purposes.
And - I changed the problem definition from
"Return the line number of the first line with a leading numeric"
to
"return the character number of the first character of the first
line with a leading numeric"
This is much more efficient to use outside the function, as well as more
efficient inside the function. The caller can now do something like
put getCharacterPosition(myData) into tPos
repeat for each line L in (char tPos to -1 of myData)
...
instead of
put getLinePosition(myData) into tLPos
repeat for each line L in (line tLPos to -1 of myData)
...
or
put line 1 of (char tPos to -1 of myData) into temp
rather than
put line tLPos of Mydata into temp
Both of these are much more efficient (will save 10s or 100s of
millisecs in large data sets).
With these changes, the binary search can now do 10M lines of input in
typically <1 msec
Even the worst case I can think of (all 300 Million characters are in a
single line, no CRs anywhere), it gets a result in 1800 msec.
So - here's the code for anyone who needs an efficient binary search of
large string data.
-- Alex.
function f3 @pD
local theResult
local tLower, tUpper, tMid, c, t
-- NB we are always going to maintain theResult as a feasible answer
-- if there is no 'leading numeric' line, we answer with a number
beyond the input data
put (the number of chars in pD) + 1 into theResult
put 1 into tLower
put theResult into tUpper
put trunc( (tUpper + tlower ) / 2) into tMid
repeat 10000 times
-- check for a CR in the upper half
put the offset(CR, char tMid to tUpper of pD) into t
if t = 0 or tMid + t = tUpper then
-- there is no CR in upper half
-- move tUpper down to near tMid.
-- Can't just move it down to exactly tMid because of the
corner case
-- where tMid to tUpper exactly spans the last line
put tMid+1 into tUpper
else
-- there is a CR in this upper half, move tMid to just beyond it
add t to tMid
-- now tMid points to the start of a line
-- do the test here - easy to adapt
put char tMid of pD into c
if c is a number then
put tMid into tUpper
put tMid into theResult
else --
put tMid into tLower
end if
end if
put trunc( (tUpper + tLower ) / 2) into tMid
if tMid = tLower then
-- we're done, just decide if this single remaining line is a
candidate for the answer
if char tMid of pD is a number then -- do the test again !!
put tMid into theResult
end if
exit repeat
end if
if tMid = tLower+1 then
-- tLower must point to the first char of an empty lie, so we
can increment over it
put tMid into tLower
end if
end repeat
return theResult
end f3
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