Python Data Structures and Algorithms

Using [] with the hash table

Using the put() and get() methods doesn't look very good, however. We want to be able to treat our hash table as a list, that is, we would like to be able to use ht["good"] instead of ht.get("good"). This is easily done with the special methods __setitem__() and __getitem__():

 

    def __setitem__(self, key, value):         self.put(key, value)     def __getitem__(self, key):         return self.get(key) 

Our test code can now look like this instead:

 

    ht = HashTable()     ht["good"] = "eggs"     ht["better"] = "ham"     ht["best"] = "spam"     ht["ad"] = "do not"     ht["ga"] = "collide"     for key in ("good", "better", "best", "worst", "ad", "ga"):         v = ht[key]         print(v)     print("The number of elements is: {}".format(ht.count)) 

Notice that we ...