Question

I’m working with a long list of name – value pairs and I will be checking with this list alot so I wanted to know what you guys think is the fastest way to do named value pair look ups. An example of my problem is as follows:

Using PHP

The variables are on the left side with the string value they are suppose to represent. There are roughly 68 variable with corresponding string values.

rKid = Hiking
rSpo = Sports
rFly = Flying

I will need a look up every web page to see what each of the variables could correspond to.
I was thinking of an array -> list value look up, but unsure of how to implement that.

Answer 1

Associative arrays in PHP are in fact hash maps, so lookup by key is very efficient. What you need is this structure:

$map = array(
    'rKid' => 'Hiking',
    'rSpo' => 'Sports,'
    'rFly' => 'Flying'
);

And the lookup is straightforward:

echo $map['rKid']; // 'Hiking'