bsearch

 

C

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Standard Library

Type support

Dynamic memory management

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Atomic operations (C11)

 

Algorithms

qsort

bsearch

 

Defined in header <stdlib.h>
void* bsearch( const void* key, const void* ptr, size_t count, size_t size,                int (*comp)(const void*, const void*) );

Finds an element equal to element pointed to by key in a sorted array pointed to by ptr. The array contains count elements of size bytes. The elements are compared using function pointed to by comp.

The behavior is undefined if the array is not already sorted in ascending order according to the same criterion that comp uses.

If the array contains several elements that comp would indicate as equal to the element searched for, then it is undefined which element the function will return as the result.

Parameters

key	-	pointer to the element to search for
ptr	-	pointer to the array to examine
count	-	number of element in the array
size	-	size of each element in the array in bytes
comp	-	comparison function which returns ​a negative integer value if the first argument is less than the second, a positive integer value if the first argument is greater than the second and zero if the arguments are equal. key is passed as the first argument, an element from the array as the second. The signature of the comparison function should be equivalent to the following:  int cmp(const void *a, const void *b); The function must not modify the objects passed to it. ​

Return value

Pointer to the found element or NULL if such element has not been found.

Example

Run this code

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
 
struct data {
    int nr;
    char const *value;
} dat[] = {
    {1, "Foo"}, {2, "Bar"}, {3, "Hello"}, {4, "World"}
};
 
int data_cmp(void const *lhs, void const *rhs) 
{
    struct data const *const l = lhs;
    struct data const *const r = rhs;
    return l->nr - r->nr;
}
 
int main(void) 
{
    struct data key = { .nr = 3 };
    struct data const *res = bsearch(&key, dat, sizeof(dat)/sizeof(dat[0]),
                                   sizeof(dat[0]), data_cmp);
    if (!res) {
        printf("No %d not found\n", key.nr);
    } else {
        printf("No %d: %s\n", res->nr, res->value);
    }
}

Output:

No 3: Hello

See also

qsort	sorts a range of elements with unspecified type (function)
C++ documentation for bsearch