Hashtable - SQL Like operation

[Krish]

Hi,
I need to have sql's LIKE operation in hashtable(or anyother collection object) key lookup. Any idea how to do it.
Eg :
Hashtable hash = new Hashtable();
hash.put("KEY_1234","ONE");
hash.put("KEY_5236","ONE");
hash.put("KEY_6278","ONE");

hash.get("KEY_%23%"); --> should return KEY_1234 and KEY_5236.

Any idea how to do it without looping through the hash

Thanks
Anand

[Geoffrey Falk]

You can't do it using the standard Hashtable. You will have to use some kind of regular expression matching, which means looping through the collection unless you implement something really sophisticated.

You may want to check out Lucene which is a text search engine, that can do what you want.

Geoffrey

[Krish]

Thanks Geoffrey.
I can't do the looping of keys because the number of keys in the hash is high(atleast 5000 keys).
I checked with Lucene too but they seem to be providing text level search and not w.r.to objects (unless I've overlooked).
Any other suggestions :roll:

Thanks
Anand

[Stefan Wagner]

How often do you iterate over those 5000 entries?
5000 doesn't look as a high value to me.
Did you test an iterating algorithm?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

"Krish",
Note that we require proper names. Please take a look at the JavaRanch Naming Policy and adjust your display name to match it.

In particular, your display name must be a first and a last name separated by a space character, and must not be obviously fictitious.

Thanks,
Jeanne
Forum Bartender

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Krish,
I agree with Stefan - 5000 isn't that many. Try it out and see how the performance is. If it turns out to be a bottleneck, you can split it into sublists by first character or something similar.

One suggestion: wrap the HashMap in your own data structure. This will make changing the implementation much easier if you need it at a later date.