Alternative to PHP's associative arrays in JAVA

Question

In PHP I could use an array with strings as keys. eg $some_array["cat"] = 123; $some_array["dog"] = 456; I just switched to Java and I can't find a data structure capable of doing this. Is this possible?

Answer 1

What you are describing is an associative array, also called a table, dictionary, or map.

In Java, you want the Map interface, and probably the HashMap class as the implementation.

Map<String, Integer> myMap = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
myMap.put("cat", 123);

Integer value = myMap.get("cat"); //123

Answer 2

You would use one of the Map implementations such as HashMap to do that.