Search plist for integer

In an iOS app, I take a four digit code from the user and give them a corresponding string in a TextView. My question is, because there are about a thousand possible code开发者_开发技巧s the user would enter that I am checking for, what is an efficient way to give a result without having a huge if or switch statement? Like, using a plist, txt file, or even database.... Thanks in advance

The decision of plist, text file or database is just a matter of storage, not search. Personally, I would just use a JSON file, since it's reasonably well-supported both by the human brain and by software. For searching, just put them in an NSDictionary and do a lookup on that. Unless your items are very big, 1000 items is not really a large dataset, even on a memory-constrained iPhone. Even if each item is 1 KB (which sounds a lot larger than the dataset you're describing), you're looking at less than a megabyte for the whole set.

If the strings happen to be long, then store the long text in a file and store the file URL in your lookup table instead of the whole string. IIRC, a URL is about 100 bytes on average, and an NSNumber is about 8, so you'd be looking at about 108 KB for the entire dataset.

Given the number of possible codes I would recommend Core Data. Alternatively you can use SQLite directly. You could use a plist, but I fear it would quickly become unmanageable as you add, remove, and update codes.