Simple string membership test

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, February 15, 2025 9:33:06 PM MST Andy Valencia via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Saturday, 15 February 2025 at 19:27:19 UTC, Ian wrote:
> > canFind is Perfect. Thank you.
>
> If performance is an issue, putting them as keys in an
> Associative Array and simply using "in" should scale nicely to
> even very large numbers of strings to search.

It can, but unless your array is large, the odds are very high that simply
doing a linear search with find or canFind will be faster. It avoids
allocating anything on the heap, and the CPU tends to be much faster when
operating on arrays. So, while the AA approach will likely be faster if the
array is long enough, your array is likely going to need to be pretty long
before building an AA just to find a single element is going to be faster -
though if you're searching for a bunch of different elements rather than
just one, it could make the AA approach faster. So, ultimately, benchmarking
with your particular data set would be required to know for sure which would
be faster, but for a single search, the AA will probably lose.

- Jonathan M Davis