Maps

# Overview

Like many other modern languages, V has built-in support for maps (sometimes called hashes or dicts in other languages). Map is an associative data type that stores key-value pairs.

Currently, maps can have keys of type string, rune, integers, floats, enums or voidptr.

Maps are ordered by insertion, like dictionaries in Python. The order is a guaranteed language feature. This may change in the future.

See all methods of map struct and maps module.

# Map Initialization

There are two syntaxes for creating a map.

The first one is used to create an empty map:

The square brackets indicate the type of the key, followed by the type of the value.

The second syntax is used to create a map with initial values:

V automatically infers the type of the key and value, in the example above the map will be of type map[string]int.

# Add elements to a map

To add an element to the map, use the expression map[key] = value:

If the map already contains an element with that key, then the value will be overwritten.

To add a new element, the m variable must be declared with the mut modifier.

# Delete elements from a map

To delete an element from a map, use the map.delete() method:

To delete an element, the m variable must be declared with the mut modifier.

# Get element from a map by key

To get an element from a map, use the map[key] expression:

If the key is not found, it will return Zero-value for a value type:

To return a different value if the key is not found, or to add custom handling for this case, use the or block:

or block, as in the case of handling Result/Option types, can contain several statements:

You can also check that a key is present in the map, and get its value if found, in a single expression using if unwrapping:

# Check if a key exists in a map

To check if a key exists in a map, use the key in map expression:

!in can be used to check for the absence of a key in a map:

# Get all keys from a map

To get all the keys from the map, use the map.keys() method:

# Get all values from a map

To get all values from a map, use the map.values() method:

# Check if a value exists in a map

To check if a value is in a map, you can use a combination of map.keys() and the in operator:

Unlike the operation of checking the presence of a key in the map, this operation requires a complete enumeration of all map values and has O(n) complexity.

# Assigning one map to another

In V, you can't just assign the value of a map variable to another variable:

There are three ways to solve this problem:

# Save a reference to the map in a variable

See References article for more information about how to use references.

In this case the m2 variable will refer to the same map as m, so changes in one map will be visible in the other.

# Use the clone() method

This method creates a copy of the map, so changes in one map will not be visible in another.

# Use the move() method

This method moves the map's internal data to a new map, thus not copying all the data, but moving internal data pointers. This is much more efficient than cloning the map, but after calling move() the m variable will be an empty map.

Only mutable maps can be moved.