At 9:56 AM +0100 2/16/09, Jochem Maas wrote:
for any reasonable number of items my tests show tedd's version pisses on McKenzies from a great height (note that I actually optimized Mckenzies variant by halfing the number of calls to strtotime()).
ROTFLOL. <-- I seldom say that! From a great height!!! Now that's funny!
I added a third variant, as a sort of control, which runs pretty much on par with tedd's version but uses rather less LOC (tedd you might like it as a little example of using array_multisort(), i.e. a way of avoiding writing the double foreach loop in this case)
The speed of the sort doesn't matter at all. The maximum number of data that needed to be sorted in my problem would have been 126 (18 different times for 7 days).
I only presented part of the problem here. It was a distilled version of the problem I was working on, which was to allow people to enter times that they were available for tutoring in two hour chunks.
So, a person might say they were available from 7:00 am to 9:00 am AND also state that they were available from 7:30 am to 9:30 am, which was a "no-no".
Having two loops allowed me to check after converting to seconds AND sorting to see if there were any overlaps. In such case I simply deleted the offending data from the array before converting everything back into normal time (min:sec).
Re this post -- all I needed was a push in the right direction. I was thinking about sorting, but I didn't even consider converting everything to seconds and then sorting.
That's really all I needed AND another reason why this list is so great! Not only did I get a push in the right direction, but I got a good laugh out of it -- "from great heights" indeed. :-)
Thanks and Cheers, tedd -- ------- http://sperling.com http://ancientstones.com http://earthstones.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
