What is the most efficient data structure for storing possibly upto thousands of ...

[oontvoo]

What is the most efficient data structure for storing possibly up to thousands of elements?

I'm reading from a text file (line by line) and I need store each line into memory. So what data structure should I use?

[JosAH]

What is the most efficient data structure for storing possibly up to thousands of elements?

I'm reading from a text file (line by line) and I need store each line into memory. So what data structure should I use?

It depends what you want to do with those lines; if you just want to process them one by one in the order they were read there is no need to store them all, otherwise a List of some form comes to mind, but, again, it depends on how you want to traverse through them and what you want to do with them.

kind regards,

Jos

[oontvoo]

Well, I'd basically need to constantly traverse the "list" and remove items as needed. So I was thinking about using a Vector from the java.util package simply because there are predefined methods that could help me do that.
So I guess the question, is it OK to use a vector to store up to thousands of elements?

[Fubarable]

You could use Vector or ArrayList (which is preferred of the two) as long as you don't run out of memory, but if you need to store thousands of Strings, also consider using a database.

[JeffGrigg]

Generally speaking, you should not use Vector; use ArrayList instead. Vector is thread safe, which makes it slow, and you don't normally need a thread safe collection.

If the data fits in memory, I would suggest using 'java.util.LinkedList', due to your 'need to constantly traverse the "list" and remove items as needed.' Use the Lists' iterator() method and the remove() method on the Iterator. (Using 'Iterator.remove()' avoids ConcurrentModificationException.) LinkedList is much faster at adding and removing elements in the middle of the list. But beware: Methods using 'int index' are slow.