Exercises: Searching Lists
Apr 092018Before attempting these exercises, you should read the post on linear and binary search.
Search Algorithms
Apr 092018Search problems are problems which ask us to find something, given a description of it. Typical search problems are like these:
- Given a list, find the index of a target value.
- Given a list of numbers, find the first negative number.
- Find the first non-empty line in a text file.
- Find all rows in an SQL database table matching a given WHERE clause.
- Given a tree, find a node which holds a target value.
- Given an HTML document, find the first
<h1>tag. - Find all tags in an HTML document matching a given CSS selector.
- Starting at a given node in a graph, find all nodes reachable via edges.
A search algorithm is one which solves a search problem. In this post, we’ll see two algorithms which solve search problems on lists.(1)