Phone Number search algorithm

[Mohan P]

Hi,

I have 100K phone numbers with owner names in a phone book. In this phone book, few names have same first name as "Steven". How to find out the phone numbers with the first name as "Steven" using any data structure technique? Please help me out with the solution.

Regards,
Mohan

[johny10151981]

What data structure are you using exactly?

[Mohan P]

No idea which data structure is efficient?

[weaknessforcats]

If you use C++ you can create a class containing your name and phone number. Let's assume the name is a C++ string.

Then you create a multimap container with objects of this class plus a string for the key (the name):

Then insert your 100K phone number/names into the multimap.

Now you can use the equal_range algorithm to return an iterator pair that brackets the first and last occurrence of your search name.

Then you simply iterate between the iterators as if your were using a begin and end iterator pair.