If anybody is familiar with Objective-C there is a collection called NSOrderedSet that acts as Set and its items can be accessed as an Array's ones.
Is there anything like this in Java?
I've heard there is a collection called LinkedHashMap, but I haven't found anything like it for a set.
Take a look at LinkedHashSet class
Hash table and linked list implementation of the Set interface, with predictable iteration order. This implementation differs from HashSet in that it maintains a doubly-linked list running through all of its entries. This linked list defines the iteration ordering, which is the order in which elements were inserted into the set (insertion-order). Note that insertion order is not affected if an element is re-inserted into the set. (An element e is reinserted into a set s if s.add(e) is invoked when s.contains(e) would return true immediately prior to the invocation.).
Every Set has an iterator(). A normal HashSet's iterator is quite random, a TreeSet does it by sort order, a LinkedHashSet iterator iterates by insert order.
You can't replace an element in a LinkedHashSet, however. You can remove one and add another, but the new element will not be in the place of the original. In a LinkedHashMap, you can replace a value for an existing key, and then the values will still be in the original order.
Also, you can't insert at a certain position.
Maybe you'd better use an ArrayList with an explicit check to avoid inserting duplicates.
Take a look at the Java standard API doc. Right next to LinkedHashMap, there is a LinkedHashSet. But note that the order in those is the insertion order, not the natural order of the elements. And you can only iterate in that order, not do random access (except by counting iteration steps).
There is also an interface SortedSet implemented by TreeSet and ConcurrentSkipListSet. Both allow iteration in the natural order of their elements or a Comparator, but not random access or insertion order.
For a data structure that has both efficient access by index and can efficiently implement the set criterium, you'd need a skip list, but there is no implementation with that functionality in the Java Standard API, though I am certain it's easy to find one on the internet.
TreeSet is ordered.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/TreeSet.html
Try using java.util.TreeSet that implements SortedSet.
To quote the doc:
"The elements are ordered using their natural ordering, or by a Comparator provided at set creation time, depending on which constructor is used"
Note that add, remove and contains has a time cost log(n).
If you want to access the content of the set as an Array, you can convert it doing:
YourType[] array = someSet.toArray(new YourType[yourSet.size()]);
This array will be sorted with the same criteria as the TreeSet (natural or by a comparator), and in many cases this will have a advantage instead of doing a Arrays.sort()
treeset is an ordered set, but you can't access via an items index, just iterate through or go to beginning/end.
If we are talking about inexpensive implementation of the skip-list, I wonder in term of big O, what the cost of this operation is:
YourType[] array = someSet.toArray(new YourType[yourSet.size()]);
I mean it is always get stuck into a whole array creation, so it is O(n):
java.util.Arrays#copyOf
IndexedTreeSet from the indexed-tree-map project provides this functionality (ordered/sorted set with list-like access by index).
You might also get some utility out of a Bidirectional Map like the BiMap from Google Guava
With a BiMap, you can pretty efficiently map an Integer (for random index access) to any other object type. BiMaps are one-to-one, so any given integer has, at most, one element associated with it, and any element has one associated integer. It's cleverly underpinned by two HashTable instances, so it uses almost double the memory, but it's a lot more efficient than a custom List as far as processing because contains() (which gets called when an item is added to check if it already exists) is a constant-time and parallel-friendly operation like HashSet's, while List's implementation is a LOT slower.
I had a similar problem. I didn't quite need an ordered set but more a list with a fast indexOf/contains. As I didn't find anything out there I implemented one myself. Here's the code, it implements both Set and List, though not all bulk list operations are as fast as the ArrayList versions.
disclaimer: not tested
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Set;
import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.Comparator;
import java.util.function.Predicate;
import java.util.function.UnaryOperator;
import static java.util.Objects.requireNonNull;
/**
* An ArrayList that keeps an index of its content so that contains()/indexOf() are fast. Duplicate entries are
* ignored as most other java Set's do.
*/
public class IndexedArraySet<E> extends ArrayList<E> implements Set<E> {
public IndexedArraySet() { super(); }
public IndexedArraySet(Iterable<E> c) {
super();
addAll(c);
}
private HashMap<E, Integer> indexMap = new HashMap<>();
private void reindex() {
indexMap.clear();
int idx = 0;
for (E item: this) {
addToIndex(item, idx++);
}
}
private E addToIndex(E e, int idx) {
indexMap.putIfAbsent(requireNonNull(e), idx);
return e;
}
@Override
public boolean add(E e) {
if(indexMap.putIfAbsent(requireNonNull(e), size()) != null) return false;
super.add(e);
return true;
}
@Override
public boolean addAll(Collection<? extends E> c) {
return addAll((Iterable<? extends E>) c);
}
public boolean addAll(Iterable<? extends E> c) {
boolean rv = false;
for (E item: c) {
rv |= add(item);
}
return rv;
}
@Override
public boolean contains(Object e) {
return indexMap.containsKey(e);
}
@Override
public int indexOf(Object e) {
if (e == null) return -1;
Integer i = indexMap.get(e);
return (i == null) ? -1 : i;
}
@Override
public int lastIndexOf(Object e) {
return indexOf(e);
}
@Override @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public Object clone() {
IndexedArraySet clone = (IndexedArraySet) super.clone();
clone.indexMap = (HashMap) indexMap.clone();
return clone;
}
@Override
public void add(int idx, E e) {
if(indexMap.putIfAbsent(requireNonNull(e), -1) != null) return;
super.add(idx, e);
reindex();
}
@Override
public boolean remove(Object e) {
boolean rv;
try { rv = super.remove(e); }
finally { reindex(); }
return rv;
}
@Override
public void clear() {
super.clear();
indexMap.clear();
}
@Override
public boolean addAll(int idx, Collection<? extends E> c) {
boolean rv;
try {
for(E item : c) {
// check uniqueness
addToIndex(item, -1);
}
rv = super.addAll(idx, c);
} finally {
reindex();
}
return rv;
}
@Override
public boolean removeAll(Collection<?> c) {
boolean rv;
try { rv = super.removeAll(c); }
finally { reindex(); }
return rv;
}
@Override
public boolean retainAll(Collection<?> c) {
boolean rv;
try { rv = super.retainAll(c); }
finally { reindex(); }
return rv;
}
@Override
public boolean removeIf(Predicate<? super E> filter) {
boolean rv;
try { rv = super.removeIf(filter); }
finally { reindex(); }
return rv;
}
@Override
public void replaceAll(final UnaryOperator<E> operator) {
indexMap.clear();
try {
int duplicates = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < size(); i++) {
E newval = requireNonNull(operator.apply(this.get(i)));
if(indexMap.putIfAbsent(newval, i-duplicates) == null) {
super.set(i-duplicates, newval);
} else {
duplicates++;
}
}
removeRange(size()-duplicates, size());
} catch (Exception ex) {
// If there's an exception the indexMap will be inconsistent
reindex();
throw ex;
}
}
@Override
public void sort(Comparator<? super E> c) {
try { super.sort(c); }
finally { reindex(); }
}
}
My own MapTreeAVL (whose implementations are under the mtAvl package next to that interface) provides both a method to obtain a SortedSet and a way to have index-based access (some so-called Optimizations such as MinMaxIndexIteration might be preferred in that case).
(Note: since my repo is open you can directly download the desired file, but I advise you to check if [and will be] some other classes in the same superpackage dataStructure are required/used/imported)
