Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Third Edition

8

Hash Tables

A hash table is a data structure that implements an associative array in which the data is stored by mapping the keys to the values as key-value pairs. In many applications, we mostly require different operations such as insert, search, and delete in a dictionary data structure. For example, a symbol table is a data structure based on a hash table that is used by the compiler. A compiler that translates a programming language maintains a symbol table in which keys are character strings that are mapped to the identifiers. In such situations, a hash table is an effective data structure since we can directly compute the index of the required record by applying a hash function to the key. So, instead of using the key as an array index ...