How to create a HashSet

The HashSet classes provides four constructors .The first three constructors crate empty sets of varying sizes:

   public HashSet ()  
   public HashSet (int initialCapacity)  
   public HashSet (int initialCapacity, int loadFactor)  

If initialCapacity is not specified, then initial set size for storing elements will be the default size of a HashMap, which is either 11 or 101 depending upon the Java version you are using. When the set capacity reaches full and a new element is added, the internal structure will double in size before adding the new element. you can also provide custom load factor in the constructor.

The fourth constructor acts as a copy constructor ,copying the elements from ine set into the newly created set:

   public HashSet (Collection c)  

You cannot provide a custom initial capacity or load factor. Instead, the internal map will be sized at twice the size of collection, or eleven if the collection is small(five or less elements),keeping the default load factor of 75%.

Note: If the original collection had duplicates ,only one of the duplicates will be in the final created set.

An easy way to initialize a set without manually adding each element is to create an array of the elements, create a List from that array with Arrays.asList(), then call this constructor with the list as the collection:

  String st[]={“a”,”b”,”c”,”d”,”e”};  
  Set set =new HashSet(Arrays.asList(str));  

Happy Learning J