Question

I have defined a simple private class named SetOb which contains an int and a Set data structure. I have a HashMap in the ‘main’ method with SetOb as Key and Integer as value. Now as you can see in the main method, when I feed the HashMap with a SetOb instance and then look for an instance with exactly the same value, it returns ‘null’. This has happened with me quite a few times before when I use my own defined data structures like SetOb as Key in HashMap. Can someone please point me what am I missing ?
Please note that in the constructor of SetOb class, I copy the Set passed as argument.

public class Solution {

    public static Solution sample = new Solution();
    private class SetOb {
        public int last;
        public Set<Integer> st;
        public SetOb(int l , Set<Integer> si ){
            last = l;
            st = new HashSet<Integer>(si);
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Map<SetOb, Integer> m = new HashMap< SetOb, Integer>();
        Set<Integer> a = new HashSet<Integer>();

        for(int i =0; i<10; i++){
            a.add(i);
        }
        SetOb x = sample.new SetOb(100, a);
        SetOb y = sample.new SetOb(100, a);
        m.put(x,500);
        Integer val = m.get(y);
        if(val!= null) System.out.println("Success: " + val);
        else System.out.println("Failure");
    }

}

Answer 1

Your x and y are not the same object instances hence contains is not able to match y against x, which ends up not finding the matching key/value in the Map.

If you want the match to succeed, please implement(override) hasCode & equals method in SetOb which will compare the field values.

Sample methods(Eclipse generated) as below:

@Override
public int hashCode() {
    final int prime = 31;
    int result = 1;
    result = prime * result + last;
    result = prime * result + ((st == null) ? 0 : st.hashCode());
    return result;
}

@Override
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
    if (this == obj)
        return true;
    if (obj == null)
        return false;
    if (getClass() != obj.getClass())
        return false;
    SetOb other = (SetOb) obj;
    if (last != other.last)
        return false;
    if (st == null) {
        if (other.st != null)
            return false;
    } else if (!st.equals(other.st))
        return false;
    return true;
}