Getting Clojure

Changing Your Map Without Changing It

The rule for modifying maps is pretty simple: you can’t. In exactly the same way that lists and vectors are immutable, maps are stubbornly resistant to change. But like lists and vectors, you can create a new map that is a modified copy of an existing map. One way you can make a modified copy is to add a key to a value, which you can do with assoc:

(assoc book :page-count 362)

Which will give you this:

{:page-count 362
 :title "Oliver Twist"
 :author "Dickens"
 :published 1838}

Using assoc is easy. You supply the original map, along with a key and a value, and you will get back a new map, just like the old one but with the key set to the new value. You can also feed more than one key/value pair ...