Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

Unordered linear search

The linear search approach depends on how the list items are stored—whether they are sorted in order or stored without any order. Let's first see if a list has items that are not sorted.

Consider an example list that contains elements 60, 1, 88, 10, and 100—an unordered list. The items in the list have no order by magnitude. To perform a search operation on such a list, one proceeds from the very first item and compares that with the search item. If the search item is not matched then the next element in the list is examined. This continues till we reach the last element in the list or until a match is found.

Here is the implementation in Python for the linear search on an unordered list of items:

 def search(unordered_list, ...