Hash Maps - The Rust Programming Language

## Hash Maps

The last of our common collections is the hash map. The type `HashMap<K, V>` stores a mapping of keys of type `K` to values of type `V`. It does this via a hashing function, which determines how it places these keys and values into memory. Many different programming languages support this kind of data structure, but often with a different name: hash, map, object, hash table, or associative array, just to name a few.

Hash maps are useful for when you want to be able to look up data not by an index, as you can with vectors, but by using a key that can be of any type. For example, in a game, you could keep track of each team’s score in a hash map where each key is a team’s name and the values are each team’s score. Given a team name, you can retrieve their score.

We’ll go over the basic API of hash maps in this chapter, but there are many more goodies hiding in the functions defined on `HashMap` by the standard library. As always, check the standard library documentation for more information.

### Creating a New Hash Map

We can create an empty `HashMap` with `new`, and add elements with `insert`. Here we’re keeping track of the scores of two teams whose names are Blue and Yellow. The Blue team will start with 10 points and the Yellow team starts with 50:

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    use std::collections::HashMap;

    let mut scores = HashMap::new();

    scores.insert(String::from("Blue"), 10);
    scores.insert(String::from("Yellow"), 50);

    #}

Note that we need to first `use` the `HashMap` from the collections portion of the standard library. Of our three common collections, this one is the least often used, so it’s not included in the features imported automatically in the prelude. Hash maps also have less support from the standard library; there’s no built-in macro to construct them, for example.

Just like vectors, hash maps store their data on the heap. This `HashMap` has keys of type `String` and values of type `i32`. Like vectors, hash maps are homogeneous: all of the keys must have the same type, and all of the values must have the same type.

Another way of constructing a hash map is by using the `collect` method on a vector of tuples, where each tuple consists of a key and its value. The `collect` method gathers up data into a number of collection types, including `HashMap`. For example, if we had the team names and initial scores in two separate vectors, we can use the `zip` method to create a vector of tuples where “Blue” is paired with 10, and so forth. Then we can use the `collect` method to turn that vector of tuples into a `HashMap`:

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    use std::collections::HashMap;

    let teams  = vec![String::from("Blue"), String::from("Yellow")];
    let initial_scores = vec![10, 50];

    let scores: HashMap<_, _> = teams.iter().zip(initial_scores.iter()).collect();

    #}

The type annotation `HashMap<_, _>` is needed here because it’s possible to `collect` into many different data structures, and Rust doesn’t know which you want unless you specify. For the type parameters for the key and value types, however, we use underscores and Rust can infer the types that the hash map contains based on the types of the data in the vector.

### Hash Maps and Ownership

For types that implement the `Copy` trait, like `i32`, the values are copied into the hash map. For owned values like `String`, the values will be moved and the hash map will be the owner of those values:

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    use std::collections::HashMap;

    let field_name = String::from("Favorite color");
    let field_value = String::from("Blue");

    let mut map = HashMap::new();
    map.insert(field_name, field_value);
    // field_name and field_value are invalid at this point

    #}

We would not be able to use the bindings `field_name` and `field_value` after they have been moved into the hash map with the call to `insert`.

If we insert references to values into the hash map, the values themselves will not be moved into the hash map. The values that the references point to must be valid for at least as long as the hash map is valid, though. We will talk more about these issues in the Lifetimes section of Chapter 10.

### Accessing Values in a Hash Map

We can get a value out of the hash map by providing its key to the `get` method:

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    use std::collections::HashMap;

    let mut scores = HashMap::new();

    scores.insert(String::from("Blue"), 10);
    scores.insert(String::from("Yellow"), 50);

    let team_name = String::from("Blue");
    let score = scores.get(&team_name);

    #}

Here, `score` will have the value that’s associated with the Blue team, and the result will be `Some(&10)`. The result is wrapped in `Some` because `get` returns an `Option<&V>`; if there’s no value for that key in the hash map, `get` will return `None`. The program will need to handle the `Option` in one of the ways that we covered in Chapter 6.

We can iterate over each key/value pair in a hash map in a similar manner as we do with vectors, using a `for` loop:

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    use std::collections::HashMap;

    let mut scores = HashMap::new();

    scores.insert(String::from("Blue"), 10);
    scores.insert(String::from("Yellow"), 50);

    for (key, value) in &scores {
        println!("{}: {}", key, value);
    }

    #}

This will print each pair, in an arbitrary order:

    Yellow: 50
    Blue: 10

### Updating a Hash Map

While the number of keys and values is growable, each individual key can only have one value associated with it at a time. When we want to change the data in a hash map, we have to decide how to handle the case when a key already has a value assigned. We could choose to replace the old value with the new value, completely disregarding the old value. We could choose to keep the old value and ignore the new value, and only add the new value if the key doesn’t already have a value. Or we could combine the old value and the new value. Let’s look at how to do each of these!

#### Overwriting a Value

If we insert a key and a value into a hash map, then insert that same key with a different value, the value associated with that key will be replaced. Even though this following code calls `insert` twice, the hash map will only contain one key/value pair because we’re inserting the value for the Blue team’s key both times:

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    use std::collections::HashMap;

    let mut scores = HashMap::new();

    scores.insert(String::from("Blue"), 10);
    scores.insert(String::from("Blue"), 25);

    println!("{:?}", scores);

    #}

This will print `{"Blue": 25}`. The original value of 10 has been overwritten.

#### Only Insert If the Key Has No Value

It’s common to want to check if a particular key has a value and, if it does not, insert a value for it. Hash maps have a special API for this, called `entry`, that takes the key we want to check as an argument. The return value of the `entry` function is an enum, `Entry`, that represents a value that might or might not exist. Let’s say that we want to check if the key for the Yellow team has a value associated with it. If it doesn’t, we want to insert the value 50, and the same for the Blue team. With the entry API, the code for this looks like:

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    use std::collections::HashMap;

    let mut scores = HashMap::new();
    scores.insert(String::from("Blue"), 10);

    scores.entry(String::from("Yellow")).or_insert(50);
    scores.entry(String::from("Blue")).or_insert(50);

    println!("{:?}", scores);

    #}

The `or_insert` method on `Entry` returns the value for the corresponding `Entry` key if it exists, and if not, inserts its argument as the new value for this key and returns the modified `Entry`. This is much cleaner than writing the logic ourselves, and in addition, plays more nicely with the borrow checker.

This code will print `{"Yellow": 50, "Blue": 10}`. The first call to `entry` will insert the key for the Yellow team with the value 50, since the Yellow team doesn’t have a value already. The second call to `entry` will not change the hash map since the Blue team already has the value 10.

#### Update a Value Based on the Old Value

Another common use case for hash maps is to look up a key’s value then update it, based on the old value. For instance, if we wanted to count how many times each word appeared in some text, we could use a hash map with the words as keys and increment the value to keep track of how many times we’ve seen that word. If this is the first time we’ve seen a word, we’ll first insert the value `0`.

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    use std::collections::HashMap;

    let text = "hello world wonderful world";

    let mut map = HashMap::new();

    for word in text.split_whitespace() {
        let count = map.entry(word).or_insert(0);
        *count += 1;
    }

    println!("{:?}", map);

    #}

This will print `{"world": 2, "hello": 1, "wonderful": 1}`. The `or_insert` method actually returns a mutable reference (`&mut V`) to the value for this key. Here we store that mutable reference in the `count` variable, so in order to assign to that value we must first dereference `count` using the asterisk (`*`). The mutable reference goes out of scope at the end of the `for` loop, so all of these changes are safe and allowed by the borrowing rules.

### Hashing Function

By default, `HashMap` uses a cryptographically secure hashing function that can provide resistance to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This is not the fastest hashing algorithm out there, but the tradeoff for better security that comes with the drop in performance is worth it. If you profile your code and find that the default hash function is too slow for your purposes, you can switch to another function by specifying a different hasher. A hasher is a type that implements the `BuildHasher` trait. We’ll be talking about traits and how to implement them in Chapter 10. You don’t necessarily have to implement your own hasher from scratch; crates.io has libraries that others have shared that provide hashers implementing many common hashing algorithms.

## Summary

Vectors, strings, and hash maps will take you far in programs where you need to store, access, and modify data. Here are some exercises you should now be equipped to solve:

- Given a list of integers, use a vector and return the mean (average), median (when sorted, the value in the middle position), and mode (the value that occurs most often; a hash map will be helpful here) of the list.
- Convert strings to Pig Latin, where the first consonant of each word is moved to the end of the word with an added “ay”, so “first” becomes “irst-fay”. Words that start with a vowel get “hay” added to the end instead (“apple” becomes “apple-hay”). Remember about UTF-8 encoding!
- Using a hash map and vectors, create a text interface to allow a user to add employee names to a department in the company. For example, “Add Sally to Engineering” or “Add Amir to Sales”. Then let the user retrieve a list of all people in a department or all people in the company by department, sorted alphabetically.

The standard library API documentation describes methods these types have that will be helpful for these exercises!

We’re getting into more complex programs where operations can fail, which means it’s a perfect time to go over error handling next!