Question

I am trying to store and get some values from Hashtable. when i getting the value by passing key to that hashtable it return an null. But that has table having that passed value as key.

I am adding the Hashtable key and value using some string variables.

EDIT:
Here is my code.

Hashtable hashtbl = new Hashtable();
string[,] ValueArray =new string[3,2];
 ValueArray[0,0]="key1";
 ValueArray[0,1]="value1";
 ValueArray[1,0]="key2";
 ValueArray[1,1]="value2";
 ValueArray[2,0]="key3";
 ValueArray[2,1]="value3";

 for(int i=0;i<ValueArray.GetUpperBound(0);i++)
 {
     string mykey=ValueArray[i,0];
     string myval=ValueArray[i,1];
 if (hashtbl.ContainsKey(mykey)==false)
     {
   hashtbl.Add(mykey,myval);
     }
   }

After that i am trying to get those values like

string newVal =hashtbl[mykey].ToString();

its throws an null exception.

Answer 1

There are few possibilities:

• you have already inserted null under the mykey before and now you are getting it back since if statement returns true
• myval is null and your code works flawlessly
• mykey is of type which has a very strange implementation of GetHashCode

The first 2 options are not actually possible, as hashtbl[mykey].ToString() would throw NullObjectReference. I would also assume that this is not the real code as I can’t think of a scenario where x.ToString() would return null, unless you forgot to mention that myval is of your custom type which overrides it in a strange way.

Therefore, I would assume the latter: myval is your type which overrides ToString in a way that it returns null.

EDIT:
after showing your code and clarifying that the last line doesn’t return null but instead throws, it looks like the second scenario is happening. If you run your code through debugger, you will see that you are inserting null values for each entry where key index is > 2. Therefore, hashtable returns null.

This snippet is suspicious: ValueArray.GetUpperBound(0) - 1. Try removing ‘-1’.