What are the pros and cons of a TreeSet
Just wondering what the pros and cons of a TreeSet is, if anyone could tell me please? Thanks!
Answer
One of the Collection classes. It lets you access the elements in your collection by key, or sequentially by key. It has considerably more overhead than ArrayList or HashMap. Use HashSet when you don’t need sequential access, just lookup by key. Use an ArrayList and use Arrays. sort if you just want the elements in order. TreeSet keeps the elements in order at all times. With ArrayList you just sort when you need to. With TreeSets the key must be embedded in the object you store in the collection. Often you might have TreeSet of Strings. All you can do then is tell if a given String is in the Set. It won’t find you an associated object he way a Treemap will. With a TreeMap the keys and the objects they are associated with are separate.
TreeSet and its brother TreeMap oddly have nothing to do with representing trees. Internally they use a tree organisation to give you an alphabetically sorted Set/Map, but you have no control over links between parents and children.
Internally TreeSet uses red-black trees. There is no need to presort the data to get a well-balanced tree. On the other hand, if the data are sorted (ascending or descending), it won’t hurt as it does with some other types of tree.
If you don’t supply a Comparator to define the ordering you want, TreeSet requires a Comparable implementation on the item class to define the natural order.