Question

I want to find the largest value in a Hashtable of Integer values. Is there any quick and efficient way to achieve this?

This is my code…

Hashtable<String,Integer> h = new Hashtable<String,Integer>();

h.add( "a",1 );
h.add( "b",5 );
h.add( "c",3 );
h.add( "d",5 );
h.add( "e",2 );
h.add( "f",1 );

int max = ???;

I need to find the maximum value, which in the example above is 5. The Hashtable will always be small, less than 100 entries on average.

Answer 1

Use Collections#max() on Map#values().

int max = Collections.max(h.values());

Note that you should be using Map#put() to put the elements, there’s no Map#add().