Protocol Parser?

[Creatures]

I'm trying to create a server for a game i've been programming for a while, the problem is what is the most efficient way to parse the data and answer correctly?

I mean a smiple if else is good enough if you dont have more than 20 commands, but imagine a protocol with more than 100? scanning through 100 if else is probably slowing the sever down^^

any good ideas?

Creatures

[vass0922]

depends entirely on your language of choice
each language has their own methods of indexed arrays

Regardless each language typically has a hash method
I know in vbs its called a dictionary, I think in Ruby it has the same name.

basically you dont want to use some crappy bubble sort, so a dictionary is a builtin method to do fast scans for specific data.

so read protocol command
lookup command in dictionary
returns value of requisite function call

[Creatures]

the looking up part is where i have my problems, because every method i found so far is as slow as a simple "if else" chain (like switch, hashtable etc.)

i'm using java btw

Creatures

[Rootstonian]

If your data is sorted, a binary search is going to be about your fastest method. Binary tree is nice for unsorted data.