RE: Most efficient way to recognize a line by its first (up to) three characters

[Thijs Schreijer <thijs@...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org [mailto:lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org] On
> Behalf Of meino.cramer@gmx.de
> Sent: dinsdag 11 maart 2014 18:26
> To: Lua mailing list
> Subject: Most efficient way to recognize a line by its first (up to) three
> characters
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> (using Lua 5.2.2 under Linux)
> 
> from a serial line I receive A LOT of lines
> consisting of data in ASCII format.
> 
> The first one to three characters decide, how
> I have to interpret the data.
> Since data are transmitted FAST I want to make
> the recognition code which branches into the
> different data processing parts as efficient
> as possible. The code will run on a embedded
> system, so I will not have the memory for huge
> look-up table or such...
> And I will do it in pure Lua since this is the
> reason why I do this in pure Lua! ;)
> 
> What is the "best" solution?
> ('best' in "" since this also a product of the
> point of view ;)
> 
> Thank you very much for any help in advance!
> Best regards,
> mcc
> 

How many branch possibilities will each byte/character have? And what do you consider 'huge' for a lookup table?