Thread: Pairs of words

Hello!

I am trying to write a dictionary type program where I basically just save a bunch of pairs of words, e.g. Spanish -> English. I want to be able to do quick lookups both ways (from Spanish to English, or the other way around).

The idea is that a word will pop up every x minutes, and I have to fill in the one that matches, in the other language.

What sort of data structure do you recommend for this? I thought about making a linked list, since that's the only structure I am somewhat familiar with. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and I am sure it will give me some training if I am better off implementing something other than a linked list.

(My program will never contain more than a few hundred words, so it's not like I really need that much speed).

Will that allow me to do lookups both ways? E.g. both lookup("cat") and the associated lookup("gato")?

I thought if you knew how to work with hash tables, you wouldn't have asked, so something simpler could be in order.

You could use a simple array of words:
char words[number of Words[200][30];

and file up one half of it with English words, say 0-99, and use 100-199 for the Spanish word in this fashion:

words[0] in English is words[100] in Spanish
words[1] in English is words[101] in Spanish
....
words[99] in English is words[199] in Spanish

You could leave all the words unsorted, or sort the English half, and match all the swaps you make in there, with the associated swaps in the Spanish half. That would allow a much more efficient binary search for the words.

For 100 words it's not necessary, but for 300 words or more, it will gradually become very helpful to speed up the search.

Nothing at all wrong with using a hash table, however. Just an option that's a bit simpler.