We are going to store some tuples into our table, that will map each name to a number. The cost to access a given number from the name should be very small, even with many entries in our table. This is the initial data:

Before starting to play with the hash, let's write a callback that will be used to free the elements from it. Since we are just storing strduped strings, we just need to free them:

We also need a callback to iterate over the elements of the list later, so we are defining it now:

Now let's create our Eina_Hash using eina_hash_string_superfast_new :

Now we add the keys and data to the hash using eina_hash_add . This means that the key is copied inside the table, together with the pointer to the data (phone numbers).

Some basic manipulations with the hash, like finding a value given a key, deleting an entry, modifying an entry are exemplified in the following lines. Notice that the eina_hash_modify function returns the old value stored in that entry, and it needs to be freed, while the eina_hash_del function already calls our free callback:

The eina_hash_set function can be used to set a key-value entry to the table if it doesn't exist, or to modify an existent entry. It returns the old entry if it was already set, and NULL otherwise. But since it will return NULL on error too, we need to check if an error has occurred:

There are different ways of iterate over the entries of a hash. Here we show two of them: using eina_hash_foreach and Eina_Iterator .

It's also possible to change the key for a specific entry, without having to remove the entry from the table and adding it again:

We can remove all the elements from the table without free the table itself:

Or free the the entire table with its content:

The full code for this example can be seen here: Hash table in action