More Efficient Searching in an Phonebook Application

[ilkeamasya]

I have an win32 console phonebook application. Phone records are held as linked list.

struct Tel_dugum{ 
char name[NAMELEN]; 
char telno[TELNOLEN]; 
Tel_dugum *next; 
};

You can see the structure of the linked list above. My problem is when i search i dont want my app to search whole records list. For example when i entered "Jo" in search section i don't want it to look for it in K to Z section of my phonebook. Any idea how can i do that?
Regards.

[mrnutty]

Bad choice of data structures. Go with std::map

[vijayan121]

Consider using a Patricia trie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_tree

A C++ standard library compatible implementation: http://code.google.com/p/patl/