Zhang Luke's Public Library

Instead of having to keep the index in a specific order, you'll learn another way to know where to look for the entry you are interested in. This method will be a function, called a hash function.

The table described is called a hash table. It's a very useful data structure. In fact, it is so useful that it's built into Python. There's a Python type (types are things like index and string) called the dictionary. It provides this functionality. At the end of this unit, you'll modify your search engine code to use the Python dictionary. However, before you learn about that, you'll learn to implement it yourself to make sure you understand how a hash table works.