steamboy

I had an instance today where I needed to find the boundaries of a collection of points. All of the points were in an array, so I thought, “OK, I’ll do a sortOn for x and then get the top and bottom values and then do the same for y. This worked, but was really slow. After doing a few tests, I realised the quicker way was to loop through the array and compare to an initial value. An added bonus is that I only need to loop through the array once for any number of values. Here’s the code:


var xLo:Number =
var xHi:Number = points[0].x;
var yLo:Number =
var yHi:Number = points[0].y;

var len:int = points.length;
for (var i:int = 0; i < len; i++)
{
var pt:Point = points[i] as Point;
if (pt.x < xLo) xLo = pt.x;
if (pt.x > xHi) xHi = pt.x;
if (pt.y < yLo) yLo = pt.y;
if (pt.y > yHi) yHi = pt.y;
}