Question

I am implementing a text-based version of Scrabble for a College project.

My dictionary is quite large, weighing in at around 400.000 words (std::string).

Searching for a valid word will suck, big time, in terms of efficiency if I go for a vector<string> ( O(n) ). Are there any good alternatives? Keep in mind, I’m enrolled in freshman year. Nothing TOO complex!

Thanks for your time!

Francisco

Answer 1

If you wanted to go for something that is in the standard library, you could use std::set with the word as the key. That would give you logarithmic search time.

Since your dictionary is presumably static (i.e. created once and not modified), you could also use a std::vector, sort it using std::sort, and then use std::binary_search on the sorted vector to find a word. This would also give logarithmic search time, and would possibly be more space efficient than a set.

If you want to implement your own data structure, a trie would be a good choice.