Question

I have two maps whose keys are Strings and whose values are Set<MyObject>. Given two Maps, what is the easiest way to merge them such that if two keys are identical, the value is a union of the two sets. You can assume values are never null and if it is useful, we can make these Maps SortedMaps.

Answer 1

Are we talking about HashMap instances. In that case lookup is O(1), so you can just take one map, iterate over the entries of that map, see whether the other map contains that key. If not, just add the set. If it contains the key, take the union of the two sets (by adding all elements of one set to another)

To illustrate with some code, where I used a Set to have autocompletion in my IDE

Map<String, Set<Double>> firstMap = new HashMap<String, Set<Double>>(  );
Map<String, Set<Double>> secondMap = new HashMap<String, Set<Double>>(  );
Set<Map.Entry<String, Set<Double>>> entries = firstMap.entrySet();
for ( Map.Entry<String, Set<Double>> entry : entries ) {
  Set<Double> secondMapValue = secondMap.get( entry.getKey() );
  if ( secondMapValue == null ) {
    secondMap.put( entry.getKey(), entry.getValue() );
  }
  else {
    secondMapValue.addAll( entry.getValue() );
  }
}