Say I have a bunch of objects with dates and I regularly want to find all the objects that fall between two arbitrary dates. What sort of datastructure would be good for this?
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Say I have a bunch of objects with dates and I regularly want to find all the objects that fall between two arbitrary dates. What sort of datastructure would be good for this?
A binary search tree sounds like what you’re looking for. You can use it to find all the objects in O(log(N) + K), where N is the total number of objects and K is the number of objects that are actually in that range. (provided that it’s balanced). Insertion/removal is O(log(N)).
Most languages have a built-in implementation of this.
You can find the lower bound of the range (in log(n)) and then iterate from there until you reach the upper bound.