What are the characteristics of TreeSet in Java?
The characteristics of TreeSet in Java include the following:
- TreeSet is implemented based on a Red-Black Tree, which is a self-balancing binary search tree that can maintain the ordering of elements.
- The elements in a TreeSet are sorted based on natural order or a specified sorting order through the Comparator interface. Elements are sorted in natural order if they implement the Comparable interface, otherwise a Comparator implementation must be provided to specify the sorting order.
- A TreeSet does not allow for storing duplicate elements. Whenever a duplicate element is inserted into a TreeSet, only the first occurrence will be added and any subsequent duplicates will be ignored.
- The time complexity for insertion, deletion, and search operations is O(logN) in a TreeSet, where N represents the number of elements in the TreeSet. This is because a red-black tree is an efficient data structure that can maintain the balance of the tree.
- TreeSet is not thread-safe and is not suitable for use in a multi-threaded environment. If you need to use it in a multi-threaded environment, you can convert TreeSet into a thread-safe SortedSet using the synchronizedSortedSet method in the Collections class.
- TreeSet provides various methods for operating on ordered sets, such as first(), last(), headSet(), tailSet(), subSet(), etc., making it easy to manipulate and search within the set.
In general, a TreeSet is a sorted collection that does not allow duplicate elements and is implemented using a red-black tree, offering high efficiency in insertion, deletion, and lookup operations.