Better Map Constructor

Question

Is there a more streamlined way to do the following?

Map map = new HashMap();
map.put(\"a\", \"apple\");
map.put(         


        

Answer 1

No, there isn't, but I wrote a method to do exactly this, inspired by Objective-C NSDictionary class:

public static Map mapWithKeysAndObjects(Object... objects) {

    if (objects.length % 2 != 0) {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException(
                "The array has to be of an even size - size is "
                        + objects.length);
    }

    Map values = new HashMap();

    for (int x = 0; x < objects.length; x+=2) {
      values.put((String) objects[x], objects[x + 1]);
    }

    return values;

}