Best way to create a hashmap of arraylist
Solution 1
You don't need to re-add the ArrayList back to your Map. If the ArrayList already exists then just add your value to it.
An improved implementation might look like:
Map<String, Collection<String>> map = new HashMap<String, Collection<String>>();
while processing each line:
String user = user field from line
String value = value field from line
Collection<String> values = map.get(user);
if (values==null) {
values = new ArrayList<String>();
map.put(user, values)
}
values.add(value);
Follow-up April 2014 - I wrote the original answer back in 2009 when my knowledge of Google Guava was limited. In light of all that Google Guava does, I now recommend using its Multimap
instead of reinvent it.
Multimap<String, String> values = HashMultimap.create();
values.put("user1", "value1");
values.put("user2", "value2");
values.put("user3", "value3");
values.put("user1", "value4");
System.out.println(values.get("user1"));
System.out.println(values.get("user2"));
System.out.println(values.get("user3"));
Outputs:
[value4, value1]
[value2]
[value3]
Solution 2
Use Multimap from Google Collections. It allows multiple values for the same key
https://google.github.io/guava/releases/19.0/api/docs/com/google/common/collect/Multimap.html
Solution 3
Since Java 8 you can use map.computeIfAbsent
Collection<String> values = map.computeIfAbsent(user, k -> new ArrayList<>());
values.add(value);
Solution 4
The ArrayList values in your HashMap are references. You don't need to "put it back to HashMap". You're operating on the object that already exists as a value in the HashMap.
Solution 5
If you don't want to import a library.
package util;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.List;
/**
* A simple implementation of a MultiMap. This implementation allows duplicate elements in the the
* values. (I know classes like this are out there but the ones available to me didn't work).
*/
public class MultiMap<K, V> extends HashMap<K, List<V>> {
/**
* Looks for a list that is mapped to the given key. If there is not one then a new one is created
* mapped and has the value added to it.
*
* @param key
* @param value
* @return true if the list has already been created, false if a new list is created.
*/
public boolean putOne(K key, V value) {
if (this.containsKey(key)) {
this.get(key).add(value);
return true;
} else {
List<V> values = new ArrayList<>();
values.add(value);
this.put(key, values);
return false;
}
}
}
Admin
Updated on June 17, 2020Comments
-
Admin almost 4 years
I have one million rows of data in .txt format. the format is very simple. For each row:
user1,value1 user2,value2 user3,value3 user1,value4 ...
You know what I mean. For each user, it could appear many times, or appear only once (you never know). I need to find out all the values for each user. Because user may appear randomly, I used Hashmap to do it. That is: HashMap(key: String, value: ArrayList). But to add data to the arrayList, I have to constantly use HashMap get(key) to get the arrayList, add value to it, then put it back to HashMap. I feel it is not that very efficient. Anybody knows a better way to do that?