How Long To Search String?
Friday November 21, 2008
I think that the biggest single failing of C is string handling. There's really no excuse because at the time when C came out, Basic had been around for about ten years and it had quite good string handling- left$, mid$ etc. Another contemporary of C was Pascal but its string handling by contrast to Basic was pretty unusable.
Efficient and fast text and string handling is one of the most important aspects of programming. For instance, most databases now offer full text search. There are a large number of ways to search text from the fairly well known Boyer-Moore to other exotic methods. These have been cataloged by Christian Charras and Thierry Lecroq at the University of Rouen's Computing Labs in a free E-Book that provides C code and examples of 35 different algorithms. I'm pleased to have added them into the C Programming Free E-Books
- Link to Free C Programming E-Books
Comments
Can’t but disagree with you, esp. when you say that most databases now offer full-text-search; what computer language are all those databases created with? BASIC? I didn’t think so.