Is checking for key existence in HashMap always necessary?
I have a HashMap with say a 1000 entries and I am looking at improving the efficiency. If the HashMap is being accessed very frequently, then checking for the key existence at every access will lead to a large overhead. Instead if the key is not present and hence an exception occurs, I can catch the exception. (when I know that this will happen rarely). This will reduce accesses to the HashMap by half.
This might not be a good programming practice, but it will help me reduce the number of accesses. Or am I missing something here?
[Update] I do not have null values in the HashMap.
Answer
Do you ever store a null value? If not, you can just do:
Foo value = map.get(key);
if (value != null) {
...
} else {
// No such key
}
Otherwise, you could just check for existence if you get a null value returned:
Foo value = map.get(key);
if (value != null) {
...
} else {
// Key might be present...
if (map.containsKey(key)) {
// Okay, there's a key but the value is null
} else {
// Definitely no such key
}
}