Question

I am assigned with the task to implement a functionality to shorten text typed text

For example , I type text like “you” when I highlight it and it has to change like “u”

I will have table which has list of words which has longer version of text and with text to be replaced.so whenever a user types word and highlights it i want to query the db for match , if a match is found I want to replace the word with the shortened word.

This is not my idea and am being assigned to this implementation.

I think this functionality will down the speed of the app responsiveness. And it has some disadvantages over the user friendliness of the application.

So I’d like to hear your opinions on what are the disadvantages it has and how can I implement this in a better manner. Or is that ok to have this kind of functionlity? Won’t it affect the app speed?

Answer 1

It’s hard to imagine that you’ll see a noticeable decrease in performance. Even the iPhone 3G’s processor runs at around 400MHz, and someone typing really fast on an iPhone might get four or five characters entered in a second. A simple implementation of the sort of thing you’re talking about would involve a lookup in a data structure such as a dictionary, tree, or database, and you ought to be able to do that pretty quickly.

Why not try it? Implement the simplest thing you can think of and measure its performance. For the purpose of measuring, you might want to use a loop to repeatedly look up words from an array. Count the number of lookups you can do in, say, 20 seconds, and divide by 20 to get the average number per second.