[RESOLVED] Searching through a CSV file

Hi all,

I am not programming in C++ quite often, but for a project I was asked to do something for a certain prject. My problem: search for a specific indices in a CSV file. I came up with the code (below) to search for a specific index in a CSV file. It is working fine, but I was wondering if I could speed up this process (it is quite 'slow' for large files). Have a look at my code and let me know how to improve it. If you know a totally different method that should work much quicker than let me know as well.

Some background on the code:
mIndex is a map<string, vector<double>> and could look something like:

"1", 0
"10", 345.0
"100", 75453.0
"2", 331.9
"20", 8865.6
...

And now I need to locate the above indices (e.g. "1", "10", ...) in a CSV file, and as soon as I found the corresponding line, do so stuff with the data from that line. The CSV file could look like:

1, PWERT12, 345.67, 12
2, YFFFER76, 866.32, 06
3, UMMFR24, 634.98, 02
...

All indices in the CSV file (e.g. 1, 2, 3, ...) are unique and could go up to 10,000. This could make it quite slow.

Thanks,
Barbados.

Code:

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// Some code here

// Using BOOST
typedef tokenizer < char_separator<char> > tokenizer;
char_separator<char> sep(",", "", keep_empty_tokens);

vector<string> vec;
string lineHeader, linePol;

// Loop over all items defined in mIndex
map<string, long>::const_iterator iter_ii;

for (iter_ii = mIndex.begin(); iter_ii!=mIndex.end(); iter_ii++) {

        // Pick up the index we are after
        string indexID = (*iter_ii).first;

        // Locate this index in the file we are reading. Always start at the beginning
        // of the file because we can't assume the file we are reading is sorted.
        in.clear();
        in.seekg(0, ios::beg);

        // Skip header lines
        getline(in,lineHeader);
        getline(in,lineHeader);

        bool indexFound = false;

        // Start reading the lines containing information
        while (getline(in,linePol)) {
                tokenizer tokens(linePol, sep);
                vec.assign(tokens.begin(),tokens.end());

                // Extract index number
                string readID = vec[0];
               
                // Check if we found the index we are after
                if (readID == indexID) {
                        // Do some stuf
                        break;
                }
        }

        //Do some more stuff
}

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You are reading the file over and over again for each index. There is no need to do that.

My suggestion would be:
1) Read the file once, and store it in memory in a map<string, string>, where the key is the index (the first token), and the value is the rest of the line
2) Now go through your mIndex, and for each index, look up the corresponding element of the map you built in step 1, and do stuff with it. Lookup in a map is very fast (O(log(n)).

Couldn’t you just go through your CSV file ONCE, and quickly look up if there is a map entry that needs to be processed?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by VladimirF

Couldn’t you just go through your CSV file ONCE, and quickly look up if there is a map entry that needs to be processed?

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That depends on whether or not the OP needs the entries of mIndex to be processed in the order they appear in mIndex. If not, then yes, this would be even faster.

If the ordering is important then you could try vector<pair<Key,Value>>