Hashtable.Item Property

Hashtable.Item Property

---

Class

System.Collections.Hashtable

Syntax

     Dim result As Object = hashtableVariable.Item(key) 

key (required; any)

The key with the related value that is to be retrieved

Description

The Item property returns the hashtable value associated with a particular key.

Usage at a Glance

• Item is the default property of the Hashtable class, so ".Item" is optional. The following two lines are equivalent.

       resultObject = myHashtable.Item("abc")     resultObject = myHashtable("abc") 

  
  

• The Item property can be used to add or update values. The statement:

       myHashtable.Item("abc") = sourceObject 

  
  

  either updates the value associated with the key "abc" (if it already exists in the hashtable) or adds it as a new item with the key "abc" (if it does not yet exist in the hashtable).

• If key does not exist in the hashtable when you attempt to retrieve a value, the Item property returns Nothing.

• To guard against inadvertently adding a member to the hashtable when you intend to modify an existing value, call the ContainsKey method to test the key.

• You can also retrieve individual members of the Hashtable object by iterating it using the For Each...Next statement. Each iteration of the loop returns a DictionaryEntry object containing a single key/value pair.

See Also

Hashtable Class