Integrate a lookup table and readout the values line by line

Hi Daniel,

There are several ways you could do this. One is to create your lookup in the file as an assoc list. For example:

(
  ("fred" 1)
  ("jim" 1 2 3)
  ("harry" 4 5)
)

fp=infile("lookup.txt")
data=car(lineread(fp))
close(fp)
assoc("jim" data) => ("jim" 1 2 3)

tab=makeTable('dataTable nil)
foreach(entry data
  tab[car(entry)]=cdr(entry)
)
tab["harry"] => (4 5)

Or you could use readTable/writeTable to read and write directly into the table - see the documentation for more details.

Essentially both lists (e.g. using assoc lists) and tables (which are associative arrays, or hash tables) are good for lookup of data based on a key. Note that an assoc list is less efficient for large lookup tables, because it does a sequential search, whereas an association table (as produced by makeTable) hashes the key and is then faster to lookup (and uses a little less memory).

Best Regards,

Andrew.

Thank you for the answer!

Regards

Daniel Pietsch