Re: Check input against list

> > > Is there some way to check that an input string is one of N possibilities, > > > where N is a large-ish number? > > I do something similar in one of my forms/scripts. > > > > $States = array("CA", "AZ", "HI"); > > > > if (isset($States[$UserEnteredState])) echo "Yes, we have service there!"; > > > > in_array() can be used very similarly. > > Now, THAT'S an interesting idea. > > In my scripts, I'm doing a lookup on a text file to find some information > related to the ISO codes. I store the codes and related info in a CSV (comma > separated values) file. Then, I loop through the file with fgetcsv(). If a > match happens, I store the related info and break out of the loop. So, if in > the lookup doesn't find a match, I know the code is invalid. The big advantage to something like the above is speed. Numeric indexed would be absurdly fast but even a hash-lookup is only a bit longer; in either case it should be much faster than even opening a file (and when the Zend cache is released it should become even faster). Of course, if you have a large number of items or need a better way of managing them it would be better to use something like MySQL. If you can make the lookup value an indexed key, a simple SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Table WHERE key='foobar' will take an extremely short period of time and it's trivial to modify it to retrieve a couple other data items you find interesting. The big win is indexing, since you avoid the overhead of parsing every line. Chris