Question

I have a java properties file containing a key/value pair of country names and codes. I will load the contents of this file into a Collection like List or HashMap.

Then, I want users to be able to search for a country, e.g if they type ‘Aus‘ in a textbox and click submit, then I want to search through the collection I have, containing a key/value pair of country codes/names (e.g AUS=>Australia), and return those countries which are found matching.

Is there any more efficient way of doing this, other than looping through the elements of the collection and using charAt()?

Answer 1

Looping with String.contains() is the way unless you want to move in some heavy artillery like Lucene.