Questions on building a fixed data table...more in content.

[bluevision]

So what I'm trying to do is compare a string to a large amount of strings contained in a table.

For example say I have the word "Today". And lets say I associate a number with that string say #1. The user will give me the word and then I have to look up the number.

So say in my table I have {"Today, 1}, {"Yesterday, 2}, {"Tomorrow", 3}, {"Monday", 4}....etc, etc, etc.

So lets say the table has 100s of these items. In order to search I don't want to build a wild if_else statement and I cannot use switches.

What I'm trying to find is the right container (right now I'm looking at maps) which I can use to search doing string comparisons. I also want this to be a fixed table data structure that I can keep in C++ when I launch my program. I don't want to use things like SQL, etc to hold a data table. Is this possible? And if not what would you all suggest? Thanks

Charles

[jsmith]

map is the right data structure, although you have to write code to save the data to file and read it back again. (whether you decide to use a database or just your own flat file is up to you.)

[bluevision]

Ok, say I don't want to write data to a file but just build my container at the very beginning of execution time and then use that container at runtime. Would this idea work?

And Thanks

I may have my 'times' messed up lol