Two-way / bidirectional Dictionary in C#?

Question

I want to store words in a dictionary in following way:

I can get word code by word: dict["SomeWord"] -> 123 and get word by word code: dict[123] -> "SomeWord"

Is it real? Of course one way to do it is two dictionaries: Dictionary<string,int> and Dictionary<int,string> but is there another way?

Answer 1

I wrote a quick couple of classes that lets you do what you want. You'd probably need to extend it with more features, but it is a good starting point.

The use of the code looks like this:

var map = new Map<int, string>();

map.Add(42, "Hello");

Console.WriteLine(map.Forward[42]);
// Outputs "Hello"

Console.WriteLine(map.Reverse["Hello"]);
//Outputs 42

Here's the definition:

public class Map<T1, T2>
{
    private Dictionary<T1, T2> _forward = new Dictionary<T1, T2>();
    private Dictionary<T2, T1> _reverse = new Dictionary<T2, T1>();

    public Map()
    {
        this.Forward = new Indexer<T1, T2>(_forward);
        this.Reverse = new Indexer<T2, T1>(_reverse);
    }

    public class Indexer<T3, T4>
    {
        private Dictionary<T3, T4> _dictionary;
        public Indexer(Dictionary<T3, T4> dictionary)
        {
            _dictionary = dictionary;
        }
        public T4 this[T3 index]
        {
            get { return _dictionary[index]; }
            set { _dictionary[index] = value; }
        }
    }

    public void Add(T1 t1, T2 t2)
    {
        _forward.Add(t1, t2);
        _reverse.Add(t2, t1);
    }

    public Indexer<T1, T2> Forward { get; private set; }
    public Indexer<T2, T1> Reverse { get; private set; }
}

Answer 2

Regrettably, you need two dictionaries, one for each direction. However, you can easily get the inverse dictionary using LINQ:

Dictionary<T1, T2> dict = new Dictionary<T1, T2>();
Dictionary<T2, T1> dictInverse = dict.ToDictionary((i) => i.Value, (i) => i.Key);