Fast Searches

[Richard Gaskin]

Ray Horsley wrote:
> I'm working with large amounts of data, say 50,000 tab delimited lines, 
> where the 4th item in each line is the same for every 20 or so lines.  
> Does anybody have a fast way of determining how many unique 4th items 
> there are in the 50,000 lines?
> 
> A repeat loop examining each line is certainly out of the question, and 
> I've tried using various functions such as itemOffset after sorting 
> ascending and descending, but this too is turning out to be kind of slow.

I've had good luck using "repeat for each" on data sets up to 40,000 
lines.  Sure, there's a pause, but it's not so bad -- give it a whirl 
and you might be pleasantly surprised.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
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