AutoHotkey Community

[toralf]

Another thing that is noteworthy is that the keys in the dictionary are case sensitive. Laszlo showed it with his test examples, but I just realized it now, since it wasn't empasized.
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Ciao
toralf

[Laszlo]

SetCompareMode() allows to set case sensitivity. Its use is also demonstrated in the example code.

At the first call NextKey creates a list, returned in the ByRef parameter "penum". In subsequent calls the handle "pdic" to the directory is not needed, so you can omit it if you want. In the example NextKey appears in a loop, so extra instructions were necessary to handle the first call differently. For simplicity, the "pdic" parameter is present, even if it is superfluous at later calls.

I understand that you can simulate modules with keys, like "Global.x", which might be sufficient for your particular application, but in general it is not a good idea. You can delete or clear whole dictionaries, count or list their entries separately; set different compare mode for each; pass them as an argument or make them local or static to functions, etc. You loose all of these with a global or hidden static dictionary, which is not even simpler to use: Add("Global.x",1) is the same long as Add(Global,"x",1).

[toralf]

[Laszlo]

Toralf: Good points. (You seem to be the only one looking into the code. There might be other problems waiting to be discovered.)

I did not know that you cannot change compare mode after you touched the dictionary (one can verify it by calling GetCompareMode). As you suggested, I moved SetCompareMode into CreateDictionary: one less function to call at initialization.

It looks like there is no memory leak, if the key list is not destroyed. It exists in the COM memory space, which seems to be destroyed at exit. It is similar with undestroyed dictionaries, too. I tried it with

[toralf]

Thanks for the clarification and the update.
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Ciao
toralf

[Sean]

[toralf]

Is there a way, to determine if a dictionary exists?
Lets say I have a var "pdic" and want to find out if it already points to a dictionary. Is this possible? I do not know the keys in the dictionary, thus I will not be able to check for them.
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Ciao
toralf

[Sean]

[toralf]

I'm using dictionaries now very extensively and came to find that they are relatively slow when used often in a loop. To test this i created a small test script:

[Laszlo]

I have the following timing in my version of Sean's script (10,000 iterations):
Add(pdic, A_Index, ID) → 844 ms
Get(pdic, "NOT_IN") → 500 ms
Get(pdic, "Test1") → 875 ms (Test1 is a key)

There is always some way to speed the code up. E.g., if you search repeatedly for the same key, you can keep the old BString. What is the application, where getting the value of a key in 0.05…0.3 ms is too long?

[toralf]

It will be an issue when you need to handle lots of data, which is stored in a dictionary.

In my case I created a special version of ActiveGoTo for SciTE. Thus I had to scan a AHK script. The longest script I have is about 5000 lines. Thus it is a loop of 5000 iterations. This takes about 0.8 seconds to finish. With an global array it only takes 0.7 seconds. That is not much of a difference anymore. Since I need the ability to stop the loop in its process, I have to check a certain status variable. For the global array I checked it every iteration, for the dictionary I now check it every 200th iterations. Checking it at every iteration took the script 3.0 seconds to finish.
Since the amout of data I extract from the file is low the speed to handle the rest of the data doesn't have a big influence. But imagine you do some funny mathematical matrice calculations. Then getting and setting values becomes an issue.
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Ciao
toralf

[Sean]

[majkinetor]

I want to know how fast dictionary is. Have anybody measured ?

MY problem is this.

When encapsulating 3th party controls sometimes I have set of functions dealing with lot of variables. Lets say there are 10 functions and each need to have access to some large number of variables


Check this out for one func

[Laszlo]

I cannot imagine com dictionaries are very fast: they convert strings, hash keys, etc., but they offer much more than this application needs. Instead of passing the dictionary handle, you can pass the variable (ByRef) containing your terms (or have this one variable global), and use simple string manipulations to get the values. (Even RegEx match seems to be slower.) Something like this:

[majkinetor]

The usage is not the problem. The problem is sharing. I already do something similar:
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