Duplicate elements in HashSet

[Tom Griffith]

Hi. I am trying to populate a hashset to be used as akeyword list. I chose HashSet because I thought it would weed out the dupes, but I am returning a hash set with all the dupes included. Does anybody know why this would be happening. I really appreciate your consideration. Thank you.

[Stefan Krompass]

Hi,

can you show us some code that lets us understand the problem? Which elements do you add to the Set? According to the API, elements are only added to HashSets when they are not already present.

Stefan

[Dun Dagda]

Hi Tom,
HashSet creates a set of key/value pairs. So you will have a set of unique keys (no duplicates allowed), but any particular unique key can point to more than one value, so the values can be duplicates (the set part only works on the keys).
Second, what objects are you using as keys to populate your hashset? Only objects whose classes have properly overridden the equals and hashCode methods of class Object, such as class String and the Wrapper classes, make useful hashing keys. Others like StringBuffer that have not overridden the equals method do not make good keys. So if you are using your own class-defined objects as keys, they will not work in HashSet unless you also override equals and hashCode.
If you just want a list of unique keywords, maybe SortedSet would be a better collection to use?

[Tom Griffith]

Thank you guys. What I'm doing is querying an Oracle db to obtain the keyword values...and populating the hash set...

HashSet keywordlist=new HashSet();

while(rs.next()){

Nrow currentresult = new Nrow();
currentresult.setDbvalue(rs.getString("DBVALUE"));
keywordList.add(currentresult);
}

So I guess since the values are equal, they have different hash codes? Thanks again...

[Dun Dagda]

So if I understand your code correctly, you are adding an NRow object to your HashSet as a key value? I think your problem may stem from this, unless NRow overrides equals and hashCode it will probably not work as a hashing key. Can't you convert your DBVALUE reference to a String and use that? Strings make good hashing keys.

[Dun Dagda]

Would this work for you?

HashSet keywordlist=new HashSet();
String currentresult = "";
 
while(rs.next()){
 
currentresult = rs.getString("DBVALUE");
keywordList.add(currentresult);
}

[Dirk Schreckmann]

Moving this to the Intermediate forum...

[Tom Griffith]

Hi Dun. I'll give it a try but does a String object override hashCode?

[Pradeep bhatt]

Originally posted by Tom Griffith:
Hi Dun. I'll give it a try but does a String object override hashCode?

yes it does.

[Pradeep bhatt]

Originally posted by Tom Griffith:
Hi Dun. I'll give it a try but does a String object override hashCode?

Check this
[URL=http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/String.html[/URL]

[Ilja Preuss]

Tom, your Nrow class needs to implement equals and hashcode correctly.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Dun Dagda:

HashSet creates a set of key/value pairs.

You're confusing HashSet with HashMap.

[Tom Griffith]

Isn't a value/hash code pairing essentially the same as the pairings found in maps?

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Tom Griffith:
Isn't a value/hash code pairing essentially the same as the pairings found in maps?

In which way?

[Tom Griffith]

I don't know, I guess a hashcode is an indexer...a unique key attached to each object in a collection, etc...which seems similar to the value/key coupling in maps...

I guess I have to mess more with maps. I use a lot of sets in beans which I iterate and convert to lists for use on jsp. I haven't tinkered wiht maps much to really distinguish the difference.
[ October 14, 2004: Message edited by: Tom Griffith ]

[Dun Dagda]

Originally posted by Ilja Preuss
You're confusing HashSet with HashMap.

I was just going by the API documentation, which implies that HashSet works by implementing a HashMap in its background, but I take your point.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Tom Griffith:
I don't know, I guess a hashcode is an indexer

Sort of, yes.

...a unique key attached to each object in a collection

No, not unique - that would hardly be possible for Strings, for example.

[David Harkness]

Originally posted by Ilja Preuss:
No, not unique - that would hardly be possible for Strings, for example.

Exactly. Hashing works by using the hash value as a first-pass efficient comparator of equality. If two objects have the same hash value, they might be equal, and equals() is used to make the determination. If the hash values are different, they cannot be equal, and thus a possibly-expensive call to equals() can be avoided.

That is why you must override both hashCode() and equals() for your own classes. String does this for you already, making them good hashing keys. The key is to make your hashing function such that it distributes values uniformly throughout the full range of int values and also makes two slightly different objects have different hash values.

On a side note, since you're selecting these from Oracle, why not select distinct values and let Oracle handle it? Are you worried about pounding the database? If you expect a lot of duplicates, then you need to weigh the cost of doing DISTINCT in Oracle versus bringing back more data over the wire than you need.