HashSet contains() method

Question

I executed below code and found the output was false.

import java.util.Set;
import java.util.HashSet;

public class Name {
    private String first, last;

    public Name(String first, String last) {
        this.first = first;
        this.last = last;
    }

    public boolean equals(Object o) {
        if (!(o instanceof Name))
            return false;
        Name n = (Name) o;
        return n.first.equals(first) && n.last.equals(last);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Set<Name> s = new HashSet<Name>();
        s.add(new Name("Donald", "Duck"));
        System.out.println(s.contains(new Name("Donald", "Duck")));
    }
}

I want to know how it behaves and why output is false.

Answer 1

You need to override hashCode() method also along with equals(). Both the methods are used for proper functionality of HashSet, so must be overriden in a user-defined class if you are making that class as a key, else hashCode() of Object class is getting used and no two different objects can be considered as same as their hashCode() would always be different, and will for sure return falsealways in the case of contains().