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      My perl program frequently needs to retrieve a cached set of data that is indexed by a positive but sparsely populated set of integers.

By the way it's Perl. Lower case perl is the command. Oh... never mind.

Based on what you said I'd go with a hash. If you really want to implement a sparse array you could to this:

package IndexedSparseArry; sub new { shift; my $self={ array => [ ] }; bless $self,"IndexedSparseArray"; } sub insert { my ($self,$index,$data)=@_; my @work = @{$self->{array}}; if ( $#work == -1 ) { # Nothing there yet. push @work,{index => $index, data => $data}; } else { my $i=0; # not to be confused with index. while ( ($i < $#work) && ($work[$i]->{index} < $index)){ $i++ } if ( $i == $#work ) { if ($work[$1] < $index ) { push @work,{index => index, data => $data); } else { $work[$i+1]=$work[$i]; $work[$i] = { index => $index, data=>$data}; } } else { my $j = $#work + 1; while ($j > $i){ $work[$j] = $work[$j-1]; $j--; } $work[$i] = { index => $index, data => $data }; $self->{array} = [@work]; } 1;
Save that file to and in your main program:
use strict; use warnings; use IndexedSparseArray; my $repo = IndexedSparseArray->new(); while (<i am reading in data >){ | handwaving $repo->insert($index,$data); } | etc.
Big Caveat: I didn't test this and I was interrupted a bunch of times. This should work, but...

I think I've given you something to chew on, hope it helps.

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional

In reply to Re: Array vs. Hash for sparsely integer-indexed data by blue_cowdawg

and:  <code> code here </code>

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