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In an iOS app, I take a four digit code from the user and give them a corresponding string in a TextView. My question is, because there are about a thousand possible codes the user would enter that I am checking for, what is an efficient way to give a result without having a huge if or switch statement? Like, using a plist, txt file, or even database…. Thanks in advance
The decision of plist, text file or database is just a matter of storage, not search. Personally, I would just use a JSON file, since it’s reasonably well-supported both by the human brain and by software. For searching, just put them in an NSDictionary and do a lookup on that. Unless your items are very big, 1000 items is not really a large dataset, even on a memory-constrained iPhone. Even if each item is 1 KB (which sounds a lot larger than the dataset you’re describing), you’re looking at less than a megabyte for the whole set.
If the strings happen to be long, then store the long text in a file and store the file URL in your lookup table instead of the whole string. IIRC, a URL is about 100 bytes on average, and an NSNumber is about 8, so you’d be looking at about 108 KB for the entire dataset.