Searchable String-Array, Android?

Question

How can I search through an String-Array? I've got an dictionary app and the words are saved in a String-Array and it would be user-friendlier, if you could search for the word you want to look up, instead of looking its way to the word. Can somebody help?

Thanks.

so your current solution is to iterate through the array until you find a given word? — mfsiega, Mar 14 '12 at 01:43

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 01:46

0

Not entirely sure what you are looking for- do you want to see if the word is in the array, or what is the goal? If you want the user to get to the word faster, changing the string-array will not help the UI jump to the right place.

If you want it to be like Google suggest you could take your array and make a tree data object, which each node representing a letter in a word. Then if the user types a, you go into that node and offer possible words.

answered Mar 14 '12 at 01:46

AJcodez

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Well you will need an EditText for user entry, and an OnTextChangeListener (or something like that) and a Tree data structure http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3522454/java-tree-data-structure – AJcodez Mar 14 '12 at 08:05

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 01:47

0

You may use the Arrays.binarySearch() method to search an element from the sorted array.

answered Mar 14 '12 at 01:47

KV Prajapati

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 14 '12 at 01:49

You can try using an ArrayList instead. Then you can see if the word is in your 'dictionary' by using the contains method, ex:

ArrayList <String> myDictionary = new ArrayList<String>();
myDictionary.add(new String("foo"));
myDictionary.add(new String("bar"));


...
// To check if the word exists in your dictionary.
if (myDictionary.contains(new String("word_to_look_up")))
{
}

Searchable String-Array, Android?

3 Answers3