OK, I need a little guidance here.

I have a list with 9500+ elements in it. Each element in this big list is a
four-item list which acts as bounding box limits. Looks like this...

[[0.0, 2.5, 0.0, 2.5], [2.5, 5.0, 0.0, 2.5] ... [350.0, 360.0, 88.5, 90.0]]

The first item in each internal list is the minimum horizontal value (the
left) for that particular bounding box, the second is the maximum horizontal
value (the right), the third is the minimum vertical value (the top), and
the fourth is the maximum vertical value (the bottom).

Then I have two floating point values, which act as x and y (or h and v)
coordinates, like these...

124.357892
20.736474

What I need to do is search the big list for an element which contains a
bounding box within which BOTH the floating point values would physically
lie. For example, if I were to successfully find the "box" element in which
124.357892 and 20.736474 resided, I might find the element [122.5, 125.0,
20.0, 22.5]. That specific "box" element contains the horizontal coordinate
(124.357892 falls between 122.5 and 125.0) and the vertical coordinate
(20.736474 falls between 20.0 and 22.5).

I hope that makes sense.

Important: There is only ONE bounding box in the big list in which the
coordinates will lie, and there will always be ONE. The bounding box values
are not in numeric order of any kind, and it can't be reliably sorted in
such a way that a binary search can be implemented on this.

What would be the speediest way to perform this search? I'm sure there's a
tricky way to do this. I just can't come up with it.


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Christopher Watson
Sr. Software Engineer
Interactive Web Media
Lightspan, Inc.
Tel 858.824.8457
Fax 858.824.8001
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