Elegant way to invert a map in Scala

Question

Learning Scala currently and needed to invert a Map to do some inverted value->key lookups. I was looking for a simple way to do this, but came up with only:

(Map() ++ origMap.map(kvp=>(kvp._2->kvp._1))) 

Anybody have a more elegant approach?

Answer 1

Assuming values are unique, this works:

(Map() ++ origMap.map(_.swap)) 

On Scala 2.8, however, it's easier:

origMap.map(_.swap) 

Being able to do that is part of the reason why Scala 2.8 has a new collection library.

Answer 2

Mathematically, the mapping might not be invertible (injective), e.g., from Map[A,B], you can't get Map[B,A], but rather you get Map[B,Set[A]], because there might be different keys associated with same values. So, if you are interested in knowing all the keys, here's the code:

val m = Map(1 -> "a", 2 -> "b", 4 -> "b") m.groupBy(_._2).mapValues(_.keys)  res0: Map[String,Iterable[Int]] = Map(b -> Set(2, 4), a -> Set(1)) 

Starting scala 2.13, this becomes even simpler and more efficient:

m.groupMap(_._2)(_._1)