I'm not sure if this applies in your specific case, but when dealing with ranges, I found that using a hash is usually not very efficient because you usually end up making sequential search through the hash keys, thereby annihilating the advantage of fast hash lookup. Using an array of sorted ranges and a binary search is often much faster in such cases.

In reply to Re: search through hash for date in a range by Laurent_R
in thread search through hash for date in a range by bfdi533

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