Elegant way to invert a map in Scala

Question

Learning Scala currently and needed to invert a Map to do some inverted value->key lookups. I was looking for a simple way to do this, but came up with only:

Answer 1

You could invert a map using:

val i = origMap.map({case(k, v) => v -> k})

The problem with this approach is that if your values, which have now become the hash keys in your map, are not unique you will drop the duplicate values. To illustrate:

scala> val m = Map("a" -> 1, "b" -> 2, "c" -> 3, "d" -> 1)
m: scala.collection.immutable.Map[String,Int] = Map(a -> 1, b -> 2, c -> 3, d -> 1)

// Notice that 1 -> a is not in our inverted map
scala> val i = m.map({ case(k , v) => v -> k})
i: scala.collection.immutable.Map[Int,String] = Map(1 -> d, 2 -> b, 3 -> c)

To avoid this you can convert your map to a list of tuples first, then invert, so that you don't drop any duplicate values:

scala> val i = m.toList.map({ case(k , v) => v -> k})
i: List[(Int, String)] = List((1,a), (2,b), (3,c), (1,d))