Question

I have an enumeration of just under 32 absolute rectangle sizes and I need to given dimensions and find the best approximation among my enumeration.

Is there any better (ie more readable and maintainable) way than the spaghetti code I am formulating out of lots of nested if‘s and else‘s?

At the moment I have just:

enum imgOptsScale {
    //Some relative scales
    w005h005 = 0x8,
    w010h010 = 0x9,
    w020h020 = 0xA,
    w040h040 = 0xB,
    w070h070 = 0xC,
    w100h100 = 0xD,
    w150h150 = 0xE,
    w200h200 = 0xF,
    w320h320 = 0x10,
    w450h450 = 0x11,
    w200h010 = 0x12,
    w200h020 = 0x13,
    w200h070 = 0x14,
    w010h200 = 0x15,
    w020h200 = 0x16,
    w070h200 = 0x17
};
imgOptsScale getClosestSizeTo(int width, int height);

and I thought I’d ask for help before I got too much further into coding up. I should emphasise a bias away from too elaborate libraries though I am more interested in algorithms than containers this is supposed to run on a resource constrained system.

Answer 1

I think I’d approach this with a few arrays of structs, one for horizontal measures and one for vertical measures.

Read through the arrays to find the next larger size, and return the corresponding key. Build the final box measure from the two keys. (Since 32 only allows 5 bits, this is probably not very ideal — you’d probably want 2.5 bits for the horizontal and 2.5 bits for the vertical, but my simple approach here requires 6 bits — 3 for horizontal and 3 for vertical. You can remove half the elements from one of the lists (and maybe adjust the << 3 as well) if you’re fine with one of the dimensions having fewer degrees of freedom. If you want both dimensions to be better represented, this will probably require enough re-working that this approach might not be suitable.)

Untested pseudo-code:

struct dimen {
    int x;
    int key;
}

struct dimen horizontal[] = { { .x = 10, .key = 0 },
                              { .x = 20, .key = 1 },
                              { .x = 50, .key = 2 },
                              { .x = 90, .key = 3 },
                              { .x = 120, .key = 4 },
                              { .x = 200, .key = 5 },
                              { .x = 300, .key = 6 },
                              { .x = 10000, .key = 7 }};

struct dimen vertical[] = { { .x = 10, .key = 0 },
                           { .x = 20, .key = 1 },
                           { .x = 50, .key = 2 },
                           { .x = 90, .key = 3 },
                           { .x = 120, .key = 4 },
                           { .x = 200, .key = 5 },
                           { .x = 300, .key = 6 },
                           { .x = 10000, .key = 7 }};

/* returns 0-63 as written */
int getClosestSizeTo(int width, int height) {
    int horizontal_key = find_just_larger(horizontal, width);
    int vertical_key = find_just_larger(vertical, height);
    return (horizontal_kee << 3) & vertical_key;
}

int find_just_larger(struct dimen* d, size) {
    int ret = d.key;
    while(d.x < size) {
        d++;
        ret = d.key;
    }
    return ret;
}