Show range of numbers based on thousands of records

I have 15开发者_StackOverflow,000 numbers ranging between 1000-8000. Each number is assigned to one of six categories and subcategories, in some cases there are overlaps. Sample data:

value  cat1    cat2
2333   WHITE   A
2334   ORANGE  B
2335   ORANGE  A
2335   WHITE   B
2336   ORANGE  A
2336   WHITE   B
2336   RED     C
2337   RED     A
2338   RED     A
2339   RED     A
2340   RED     A

What's an efficient way of combining these values as such:

• White: 2333, 2335-2336
• Orange: 2334-2335, 2336
• Red: 2336-2340

Use case: Given a value such as 2338 A what is an efficient way of retrieving the cat1 value of RED?

For this use case, what would be a more efficient way of storing these strings to test against?

Language preference is JavaScript, PHP or MS Excel

To me it seems your looking in the wrong place for your solution.

The MOST efficient way to do the type of "retrieving" any variation/combination of your data is to "query" a database.

If it was me I'd dump all my data in MySQL and do simple query from there:

$num = 2338
$letter = A

SQL:

SELECT cat1
FROM dataSet
WHERE value = $num AND catb = $letter

Change your search values accordingly.

Because this question is tagged Excel, I will mention that you can use ADO and Jet to query Excel.