Trusted answers to developer questions
What is chaining in hash tables?
Chaining is a technique used for avoiding collisions in hash tables.
A collision occurs when two keys are hashed to the same index in a hash table. Collisions are a problem because every slot in a hash table is supposed to store a single element.
The chaining technique
In the chaining approach, the hash table is an array of linked lists i.e., each index has its own linked list.
All key-value pairs mapping to the same index will be stored in the linked list of that index.
The benefits of chaining
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Through chaining, insertion in a hash table always occurs in O(1) since linked lists allow insertion in constant time.
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Theoretically, a chained hash table can grow infinitely as long as there is enough space.
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A hash table which uses chaining will never need to be resized.
RELATED TAGS
hash tables
data structures
hashing
chaining
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