Question

I have a mutable HashMap and would like to use it like a default-dictionary. The obvious method appears to be to use getOrElse and provide the default value each time as a second value. However this seems a little inelegant in my use case since the default value doesn’t change.

var x = HashMap(1 -> "b", 2 -> "a", 3 -> "c")

println(x.getOrElse(4, "_")
println(x.getOrElse(5, "_"))
// And so on...
println(x.getOrElse(10, "_"))

Is there any way to create a HashMap (or similar class) such that attempting to access undefined keys returns a default value set on the creation of the HashMap? I notice that HashMap.default is just set to throw an exception but I wonder if this can be changed…

Answer 1

Try this:

import collection.mutable.HashMap
val x = new HashMap[Int,String]()  { override def default(key:Int) = "-" }
x += (1 -> "b", 2 -> "a", 3 -> "c")

Then:

scala> x(1)
res7: String = b

scala> x(2)
res8: String = a

scala> x(3)
res9: String = c

scala> x(4)
res10: String = -