better way?

[david lightman]

I basically want to check a key in a hashtable (dog) and if there is a key named dog pull the value which is his name.

but it seems like alot of moving around, is there a better way to do this?

 
if(myClass.getHashTableData()!= null)
{

Hashtable ht = new Hashtable(myClass.getHashTableData());

String dog = "DOG";

String dogsName = (String)ht.get(dog); 
}
 
 

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

You can factor out the variable "dog", and you don't need to construct a new Hashtable (very inefficient, and totally unnecessary!)

Hashtable ht = myClass.getHashTableData();
if (ht != null) {
  String dogName = (String) ht.get("DOG");
}

You could remove the check for null if you assured that getHashTableData() never returned null -- generally a smarter, cleaner way to program. Then you could write it in one line:

String dogName = (String) myClass.getHashTableData().get("DOG");

[Rick O'Shay]

Avoid ever having a null collection. It's much better to assume you have a valid collection and check the size for something greater than zero. Also, unless you have an old version of Java you should specifiy what is in your collection. Never use Hashtable: use HashMap. You can synchronize access to your HashMap, if needed, and use it consitently everywhere. Finally, always declare the collection interface not the concrete type.

public class DogPound
{
   Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>(); // empty
 
   ...
 
   public String get(String key) { return map.get(key); }
}