C Program To Implement Dictionary Using Hashing Algorithms |top| May 2026
Report: Dictionary Implementation Using Hashing Algorithms in C
1. Abstract
This report presents the design and implementation of a dictionary data structure in the C programming language using hashing techniques. A dictionary, also known as a symbol table or associative array, stores key-value pairs and supports efficient insertion, search, and deletion operations. Hashing provides average-case O(1) time complexity for these operations. This implementation uses separate chaining to handle collisions and a simple polynomial rolling hash function for strings.
dictionary is an abstract data type that maps unique keys to values. Since C lacks a built-in dictionary like Python or C#, you can implement one efficiently using a hash table . This approach provides average constant-time complexity, , for insertion, search, and deletion. 1. Define the Data Structures c program to implement dictionary using hashing algorithms
free_dict(dict); return 0; destroy_table(dict); return 0; // Case A: Key exists? Update the value. while (current != NULL) if (strcmp(current->key, key) == 0) current->value = value; return;- Better cache locality.
- No pointer overhead.
2.1 Separate Chaining
In separate chaining, each bucket of the hash table points to a linked list (or another dynamic data structure) of entries that hash to that index. destroy_table(dict); return 0; // Case A: Key exists
- Hash Function:
hash = hash_function(key) - Compression:
index = hash % table_size - Storage: Store the
(key, value)pair attable[index].
