Question

I have a Hashtable of type Hashtable

I’ve loaded several strings as keys, one of which is “ABCD”

However, later when I go to look up “ABCD”, the Hashtable returns null instead of the associated object. Further the keyset contains “ABCD”, but a request to containsKey(“ABCD”) returns false.

Is this because String objects are inherently different objects?

If so, what is the write way to store information in a Hashtable if I want to use Strings as keys?

 public class Field {
        private String name;
        private DataType dataType;

        public Field(String name, DataType dataType) {
            this.name = name;
            this.dataType = dataType;
        }

        public String getName() {
            return name;
        }

        public DataType getDataType() {
            return dataType;
        }

        public String toString() {
            return name;
        }
    }

public class Record {
        private Hashtable<String, Data> content; 

        public Record(Field[] fieldList) {
            this.fieldList = fieldList;     
            content = new Hashtable<String, Data>();

            System.out.println(fieldList.length);

            for(Field f : fieldList) {          
                content.put(f.getName(), new Data());
            }
        }

        public void add(String field, String s) {
                    // ERROR OCCURS HERE IN THIS METHOD !!!

            System.out.println(field);

            for(String ss : content.keySet()) {
                System.out.print(" [ " + ss + " ] ");
            }
            System.out.println();

            System.out.println(content.containsKey(field));     
            System.out.println(content.get(field));

            content.get(field).add(s);
        }
}



public class Data {

    private Vector<String> lines;
    private int index;

    public Data() {
        lines = new Vector<String>();
        index = 0;
    }

    public void add(String s) {
        System.out.println("adding");
        lines.add(s);
    }

    public String nextLine() {
        try {
            return lines.elementAt(index++);
        } catch (ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException aioobe) {
            return null;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Works for me!

import java.util.Hashtable;

public class StrMap {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Hashtable<String,Object> map = new Hashtable<String,Object>();
        map.put("ABCD", "value");
        System.err.println(map.containsKey("ABCD"));
    }
}

Yo have probably made some other error. Reduce the problem to the smallest complete compilable program that still demonstrates the problem. You’ll probably find the problem straight away. If you don’t, at least you will have a question that we can answer.

(Also Map and HashMap is that way to go. Hashtable is useful if you are using a pre-Java 2 API (Java 2 is comfortably over a decade old now!).)