Question

Say I have a hashmap with String type as key and ArrayList type as value, example {"value1"=["one","three","five"], "value2"=["two","four","six"]} where “value1” and “value2” are keys. I want to write the above hashmap data in following format. (so that I can read the csv file in excel)

value1,value2
one,two
three,four
five,six

My idea was to write the first key and its values as follows

value1
one
three
five

Then I was thinking of using the seek method in RandomAccessFile class to back to line 1 and again write the second key and its values. However I am not able to accomplish this task since seek function takes in the length of strings in the entire file and writes the new string after it. While I wanted the pointer to jump to the first line and append the string. Is there a better way to do this?. A quick example would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Why can’t you just use 4 Strings, one for each row? Something like this:

StringBuilder keyRow = new StringBuilder();
StringBuilder value1 = new StringBuilder();
StringBuilder value2 = new StringBuilder();
StringBuilder value3 = new StringBuilder();

Iterator keys = hashmap.keySet().iterator();
boolean notFirst = true;
while(keys.hasNext()) {
    String key = (String)keys.next();
    ArrayList list = (ArrayList)hashmap.get(key);
    if(!notFirst) {
        keyRow.append(",");
        value1.append(",");
        value2.append(",");
        value3.append(",");
    }
    keyRow.append(key);
    value1.append((String)list.get(0));
    value2.append((String)list.get(1));
    value3.append((String)list.get(2));
    notFirst = false;
}

Then at the end, just take the 4 Strings

String csv = keyRow.toString()+"\n"+value1.toString()+"\n"+value2.toString()+"\n"+value3.toString();

Note that this example isn’t really proper CSV. Strings with commas aren’t wrapped in quotes.

---

Or you iterate through the HashMap a thousand times if you have thousands of these rows. To save a bit of time from looking up a key, you can put them all in an ArrayList:

StringBuilder csv = new StringBuilder();
int row = 0;
ArrayList<ArrayList> list = new ArrayList<ArrayList>();

// Write the keys row:
Iterator keys = hashmap.keySet().iterator();
boolean notFirst = true;
while(keys.hasNext()) {
    String key = (String)keys.next();
    ArrayList tmp = (ArrayList)hashmap.get(key);
    if(!notFirst) {
        csv.append(",");
    }
    csv.append(key);
    // store list
    list.add(tmp);
    notFirst = false;
}
csv.append("\n");


// Write the rest of the rows
while(row<numberOfTotalRow) {
    notFirst = true;
    for(int x=0;x<list.size();x++) {
        if(!notFirst) {
            csv.append(",");
        }
        csv.append((String)list.get(x).get(row));
        notFirst = false;
    }   
    row++; 
}