Question

I want to get the key of a HashMap using the value.

hashmap = new HashMap<String, Object>();

haspmap.put("one", 100);
haspmap.put("two", 200);

Which means i want a function that will take the value 100 and will return the string one.

It seems that there are a lot of questions here asking the same thing but they don’t work for me.

Maybe because i am new with java.

How to do it?

Answer 1

The put method in HashMap is defined like this:

Object  put(Object key, Object value) 

key is the first parameter, so in your put, “one” is the key. You can’t easily look up by value in a HashMap, if you really want to do that, it would be a linear search done by calling entrySet(), like this:

for (Map.Entry<Object, Object> e : hashmap.entrySet()) {
    Object key = e.getKey();
    Object value = e.getValue();
}

However, that’s O(n) and kind of defeats the purpose of using a HashMap unless you only need to do it rarely. If you really want to be able to look up by key or value frequently, core Java doesn’t have anything for you, but something like BiMap from the Google Collections is what you want.