I am goingto be starting work soon on a new project at work. Essentially there are many chemical compounds here each has its own prefix / identifier. For example a couple of chars followed by a few ints and that sort of thing, tho they all vary.
I was wondering if there was an algorithm for matching these elements efficiently, opposed to having a massive if else.
I guess a hash map with key -> value with the key being some mask may be good but i was hoping someone could suggest something a little more sophisticated that i could use.
Because its not just for chemical compounds the number of different values it could be is huge.