Working with Maps
A map is an object that stores associations between keys and values, or key/value pairs. Given
a key, you can find its value. Both keys and values are objects. The keys must be unique, but
the values may be duplicated. Some maps can accept a null key and null values, others cannot.
There is one key point about maps that is important to mention at the outset: they don't
implement the Iterable interface. This means that you cannot cycle through a map using a
for-each style for loop. Furthermore, you can't obtain an iterator to a map. However, as you
will soon see, you can obtain a collection-view of a map, which does allow the use of either
the for loop or an iterator.
The Map Interfaces
Because the map interfaces define the character and nature of maps, this discussion of maps
begins with them. The following interfaces support maps:
Interface
Description
Map
Maps unique keys to values.
Map.Entr y
Describes an element (a key/value pair) in a map. This is an inner class of Map.
NavigableMap Extends Sor tedMap to handle the retrieval of entries based on closest-match
searches. (Added by Java SE 6.)
Sor tedMap
Extends Map so that the keys are maintained in ascending order.
Each interface is examined next, in turn.
The Map Interface
The Map interface maps unique keys to values. A key is an object that you use to retrieve a
value at a later date. Given a key and a value, you can store the value in a Map object. After
the value is stored, you can retrieve it by using its key. Map is generic and is declared as
shown here:
interface Map<K, V>
Here, K specifies the type of keys, and V specifies the type of values.
The methods declared by Map are summarized in Table 17-10. Several methods
throw a ClassCastException when an object is incompatible with the elements in a map. A
NullPointerException is thrown if an attempt is made to use a null object and null is not
allowed in the map. An UnsupportedOperationException is thrown when an attempt is
made to change an unmodifiable map. An IllegalArgumentException is thrown if an
invalid argument is used.
Maps revolve around two basic operations: get( ) and put( ). To put a value into a map,
use put( ), specifying the key and the value. To obtain a value, call get( ), passing the key as
an argument. The value is returned.
As mentioned earlier, although part of the Collections Framework, maps are not,
themselves, collections because they do not implement the Collection interface. However,
you can obtain a collection-view of a map. To do this, you can use the entrySet( ) method. It
returns a Set that contains the elements in the map. To obtain a collection-view of the keys,
Search WWH :
