Iterators and hash tables


Whoever used g_hash_table_foreach() knows how painful is to use since C doesn’t have closures, so you have to create a struct to pass local variables to the callback.

Jean-Yves Lefort wrote a patch for bug #500507 (now marked as accept-commit_now) that finally adds iterators to hash tables. Using glib 2.16 you will be able to do this:

GHashTableIter it;
gpointer key;
gpointer value;

g_hash_table_iter_init (table, &it);
while (g_hash_table_iter_next (&it, &key, &value))
  {
    /* do something with key and value */
  }

Thank you Jean-Yves!

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December 7th, 2007
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Emmanuele Bassi
Posted on:
December 7, 2007 at 9:14 pm

mmh, and why not using the get_keys() and get_values() method I added in GLib 2.14?

keys = g_hash_table_get_keys (table);
for (l = keys; l != NULL; l = l->next)
{
gpointer key = l->data;
gpointer value = g_hash_table_lookup (table, key);

/* do something with key and value */
}
g_list_free (keys);

this new API seems like a bit of syntactic sugar for high level languages refugees, but other than that I don’t really see the point.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Mathias Hasselmann
Posted on:
December 8, 2007 at 11:38 am

Emmanuele Bassi: The iterator safes you the g_list_free and the table lookup, which both do not come for free.

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
barisione
Posted on:
December 8, 2007 at 2:07 pm

I agree that it’s just a bit of syntactic sugar but a handy bit of syntactic sugar.

get_keys() and get_values() are useful but in this case they are not as handy as iter_init()/_next() and you have to free the list and to do a lookup.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
Zeeshan Ali
Posted on:
December 8, 2007 at 5:12 pm

“I agree that it’s just a bit of syntactic sugar but a handy bit of syntactic sugar.”

Agreed. :)