Fastest way to convert a list of doubles to a unique list of integers?
- by javanix
I am dealing with a MySQL table here that is keyed in a somewhat unfortunate way. Instead of using an auto increment table as a key, it uses a column of decimals to preserve order (presumably so its not too difficult to insert new rows while preserving a primary key and order).
Before I go through and redo this table to something more sane, I need to figure out how to rekey it without breaking everything.
What I would like to do is something that takes a list of doubles (the current keys) and outputs a list of integers (which can be cast down to doubles for rekeying).
For example, input {1.00, 2.00, 2.50, 2.60, 3.00} would give output {1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Since this is a database, I also need to be able to update the rows nicely:
UPDATE table SET `key`='3.00' WHERE `key`='2.50';
Can anyone think of a speedy algorithm to do this? My current thought is to read all of the doubles into a vector, take the size of the vector, and output a new vector with values from 1 => doubleVector.size. This seems pretty slow, since you wouldn't want to read every value into the vector if, for instance, only the last n/100 elements needed to be modified.
I think there is probably something I can do in place, since only values after the first non-integer double need to be modified, but I can't for the life of me figure anything out that would let me update in place as well. For instance, setting 2.60 to 3.00 the first time you see 2.50 in the original key list would result in an error, since the key value 3.00 is already used for the table.
