Maps

Maps (dictionaries, hash maps). Initializing a map can be done literally or via the make function.

// maps a string to an int

m := make(map[string]int)

n := map[string]int{"foo": 1, "bar": 2}

We access the map (with the key) and insert/update values as shown below:

m["k1"] = 7

We can remove a key with the delete method.

delete(m, "key1")

We can get the size of a map using the len method, i.e. len(m).

If we access a key that does not exist, Go returns a zeroed value. There are 3 possibilities when we access a map:

• Key exists
• Key does not exists
• Key exists with an zeroed value or Key does not exist and hence there a zeroed value is returned (ambiguous)

To prevent the ambiguity in the 3rd case, we use this syntax: elem , ok := m[key]. The returned variable ok is a boolean type which indicates if the key was present or not.

There is no order to it, iterating over a map does not guarantee any particular order.

Passing maps to a function passes the pointer of the map. Modifying the map within a function will modify the original map.

Range Operation

The range keyword is used to iterate on slices and maps. The range operation returns two values for every iteration - first is the index and second is the element at that index.

nums := []int{1, 2, 3, 4}

sum := 0

// here we have ignored the first return value, the index

for _, num := range nums {

sum += num

}

kvs := map[string]string{"a": "apple", "b": "banana"}

for k, v := range kvs {

fmt.Printf("%s -> %s\n", k, v)

}

Exercise!

Create a map, iterate over it using the range operation and print them out to the console.