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Guile Reference Manual

22.7.3.1 Hash Table Examples

For demonstration purposes, this section gives a few usage examples of some hash table procedures, together with some explanation what they do.

First we start by creating a new hash table with 31 slots, and populate it with two key/value pairs.

(define h (make-hash-table 31)) (hashq-create-handle! h 'foo "bar") => (foo . "bar") (hashq-create-handle! h 'braz "zonk") => (braz . "zonk") (hashq-create-handle! h 'frob #f) => (frob . #f)

You can get the value for a given key with the procedure hashq-ref, but the problem with this procedure is that you cannot reliably determine whether a key does exists in the table. The reason is that the procedure returns #f if the key is not in the table, but it will return the same value if the key is in the table and just happens to have the value #f, as you can see in the following examples.

(hashq-ref h 'foo) => "bar" (hashq-ref h 'frob) => #f (hashq-ref h 'not-there) => #f

Better is to use the procedure hashq-get-handle, which makes a distinction between the two cases. Just like assq, this procedure returns a key/value-pair on success, and #f if the key is not found.

(hashq-get-handle h 'foo) => (foo . "bar") (hashq-get-handle h 'not-there) => #f

There is no procedure for calculating the number of key/value-pairs in a hash table, but hash-fold can be used for doing exactly that.

(hash-fold (lambda (key value seed) (+ 1 seed)) 0 h) => 3