Question

What is the most straightforward way to create a hash table (or associative array…) in Java? My google-fu has turned up a couple examples, but is there a standard way to do this?

And is there a way to populate the table with a list of key->value pairs without individually calling an add method on the object for each pair?

Answer 1

Map map = new HashMap(); Hashtable ht = new Hashtable(); 

Both classes can be found from the java.util package. The difference between the 2 is explained in the following jGuru FAQ entry.