Thursday, January 22, 2009

Hash Tables in JavaScript

Hashing has lots of benefits for storing data. We achieve hashing in various languages but doing it througn Javascript was something very special. While the basic purpose of using a Hash Table is to store a key value pair, but there are also other ways to use it. I used it for checking duplicate values. Below is the code for Hash Tables in Javascript.

Code for creating a Hash Table:

//Initializes the Hash Table
function HashTable(){ this.hashArr = new Array(); this.length = 0;}

//Get Function to read the contents
HashTable.prototype.get = function(key) { return this.hashArr[key];};

//Put function for storing key value
HashTable.prototype.put = function(key, value) { if (typeof(this.hashArr[key]) == 'undefined') { this.length++; } this.hashArr[key] = value;};

For Checking Duplicate values:
Store the element to be checked as key. If Duplicate it will not get inserted and the length of Hash Table remains same. Compare this value with a counter. If counter is greater than length it is a duplicate.

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