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Programming-Idioms

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  • C#

Idiom #124 Binary search for a value in sorted array

Write the function binarySearch which returns the index of an element having the value x in the sorted array a, or -1 if no such element exists.

using System;
public static int binarySearch<T>(T[] a, T x)
{
    var result = Array.BinarySearch<T>(a, x);
    return result >= 0 ? result : -1;
}
using System.Collections.Generic;
public static int binarySearch<T>(List<T> a, T x)
{
    var result = a.BinarySearch(x);
    return result >= 0 ? result : -1;
}

Not strictly an array, but C# makes moving between arrays and lists fairly painless, so this is a quick, in-built way to accomplish it.
#include <vector>
template<typename T>
int binarySearch(const std::vector<T> &a, const T &x)
{
    if(a.size() == 0) return -1;

    size_t lower = 0;
    size_t upper = a.size() - 1;

    while(lower <= upper)
    {
        auto mid = lower + (upper-lower) / 2;

        if(x == a[mid])
        {
            return (int)mid;
        }
        else if(x > a[mid])
        {
            lower = mid + 1;
        }
        else
        {
            upper = mid - 1;
        }
    }

    return -1;
}

Check for an empty vector up front, otherwise size() will return an unsigned 0, and subtracting 1 will be a big number!

New implementation...
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