Iterating over and deleting from Hashtable in Java

Question

I have a Hashtable in Java and want to iterate over all the values in the table and delete a particular key-value pair while iterating.

How may this be done?

Answer 1

You need to use an explicit java.util.Iterator to iterate over the Map's entry set rather than being able to use the enhanced For-loop syntax available in Java 6. The following example iterates over a Map of Integer, String pairs, removing any entry whose Integer key is null or equals 0.

Map<Integer, String> map = ...

Iterator<Map.Entry<Integer, String>> it = map.entrySet().iterator();

while (it.hasNext()) {
  Map.Entry<Integer, String> entry = it.next();

  // Remove entry if key is null or equals 0.
  if (entry.getKey() == null || entry.getKey() == 0) {
    it.remove();
  }
}

Answer 2

You can use Enumeration:

Hashtable<Integer, String> table = ...

Enumeration<Integer> enumKey = table.keys();
while(enumKey.hasMoreElements()) {
    Integer key = enumKey.nextElement();
    String val = table.get(key);
    if(key==0 && val.equals("0"))
        table.remove(key);
}

Answer 3

You can use a temporary deletion list:

List<String> keyList = new ArrayList<String>;

for(Map.Entry<String,String> entry : hashTable){
  if(entry.getValue().equals("delete")) // replace with your own check
    keyList.add(entry.getKey());
}

for(String key : keyList){
  hashTable.remove(key);
}

You can find more information about Hashtable methods in the Java API

Answer 4

So you know the key, value pair that you want to delete in advance? It's just much clearer to do this, then:

 table.delete(key);
 for (K key: table.keySet()) {
    // do whatever you need to do with the rest of the keys
 }