Are we there yet ? Sameer Tyagi's Blog Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.

C# and SubMaps

It took me a while to figure out why my C# code wasnt working as expected today. After much debugging it turned out that C# doesnt have a clean SubMap implementation, or least one that I could find. What I was assuming will work wasnt quite cutting it.In Java you can easily get a subMap using string keys based on a regular expression magically. For example the code, Prints out something like...

TreeMap  sortedMap = new TreeMap ();
for(int i = 0;i<10;i++)
    sortedMap.put("SomeKey_"+i, "SomeValue");
System.out.println(sortedMap);
String low = "SomeKey_3", high = "SomeKey~";
System.out.println(low);
System.out.println(high); 

{SomeKey_0=SomeValue, SomeKey_1=SomeValue, SomeKey_2=SomeValue, SomeKey_3=SomeValue, SomeKey_4=SomeValue,
 SomeKey_5=SomeValue, SomeKey_6=SomeValue, SomeKey_7=SomeValue, SomeKey_8=SomeValue, SomeKey_9=SomeValue}
SomeKey_3
SomeKey~
{SomeKey_3=SomeValue, SomeKey_4=SomeValue, SomeKey_5=SomeValue, SomeKey_6=SomeValue, SomeKey_7=SomeValue, 
SomeKey_8=SomeValue, SomeKey_9=SomeValue}

The closest way of doing this in C# is a bit of a hack using the System.Collections.SortedList and the Comparer classes and its specific to what I was trying to do.I replace the regex ~ with a series of 9's.

 public static SortedList SubMap(SortedList list, System.Object lowerLimit, System.Object upperLimit) {
            string upperStr = upperLimit.ToString();
              if (upperStr.EndsWith("~"))
                upperLimit = upperStr.Replace("~", "999999999999999");
            Comparer comparer = Comparer.Default;
            SortedList newList = new SortedList();
            if (list != null){
                if ((list.Count > 0) &&(comparer.Compare(lowerLimit,upperLimit) <1)){
                    int index = 0;
                    while (comparer.Compare(list.GetKey(index), lowerLimit) < 0)
                        index++;
                    for (; index < list.Count; index++){
                        if (comparer.Compare(list.GetKey(index), upperLimit) > 0)
                            break;
                          newList.Add(list.GetKey(index), list[list.GetKey(index)]);
                    }
                }
            }
            return newList;
        }

Certainly not clean but its all I can think of right now. For all the C# code floating on the web I couldnt find a SubMap implementation that does what the J2SE classes do. Anyone have any better ideas ? ( Mar 25 2006, 03:31:39 AM EST ) Permalink Comments [0]