Question

In data processing, I frequently need to create a lookup data structure to map one identifier to another. As a concrete example, let’s take a structure which holds a 1-to-1 mapping between a country’s 2 character code and its full name. In it we would have

AD -> Andorra    AE -> United Arab Emirates   AF -> Afghanistan 

What’s a good name for the variable that would hold this map? Some ideas (I’ll use camel-case names):

countryNameByCode nameByCodeLookup nameCodeLookup codeToName 

Answer 1

My vote would be for codeToName in this particular case, and I guess that generalizes. That’s not to say that it’s the name I would have chosen myself in all cases; that depends a lot on scope, further encapsulation, and so on. But it feels like a good name, that should help make your code readable:

String country = codeToName['SV']; 

Looks fairly nice, should be easily understandable by anyone. Possibly change the word ‘code’ to something more precise (‘countrycode’ would be my next choice).