Re: Best way to check if all elements in a List are unique

From:
"John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:09:18 -0500
Message-ID:
<nospam-4C0145.15091802032010@news.aioe.org>
In article <alpine.DEB.1.10.1003021900150.13870@urchin.earth.li>,
 Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li> wrote:

On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Lew wrote:

Mike Schilling wrote:

boolean areListElementsUnique(List<?> l)
{
    return l.size() == new HashSet<Object>(l).size();

}


laredotornado wrote:

Winner! -


Don't forget to null-check the argument!


The method already does that - if it's null, you get a
NullPointerException.


I thought the idea was to treat empty and unitary lists as unique, not
to mention skirting the size() of null.

Here's a primitive test:

import java.util.*;

public class SetTest {

    private static final int MAX = 10000;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        List<String> names = new ArrayList<String>();
        List<Integer> numbers = new ArrayList<Integer>();
        for (int i = 0; i < MAX; ++i) {
            names.add(String.valueOf(i + MAX));
            numbers.add(Integer.valueOf(i + MAX));
        }
        for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
            test(names);
            test(numbers);
        }
    }

    private static <T> void test(List<T> list) {
        if (list == null) return;
        int s1 = list.size();
        long start = System.nanoTime();
        int s2 = new HashSet<T>(list).size();
        long stop = System.nanoTime();
        System.out.println("HashSet: " + s1 + " " + s2
            + " " + (s1 == s2) + dt(stop - start));
        start = System.nanoTime();
        s2 = new TreeSet<T>(list).size();
        stop = System.nanoTime();
        System.out.println("TreeSet: " + s1 + " " + s2
            + " " + (s1 == s2) + dt(stop - start));
    }

    private static String dt(long nanos) {
        return String.format("%7.3f ms.", nanos / 1000000d);
    }
}

--
John B. Matthews
trashgod at gmail dot com
<http://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews>

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