Search operation in quadratic probing

The search operation is one of the primary operations on a hash table and is used to retrieve the value of a key as stored in the hash table. The implementation is encapsulated in the search function and relies on the quadratic probing collision resolution scheme to look for a value in the internal array. Let us look at the algorithm and implementation of the search operation in a hash table using quadratic probing.

Algorithm

The search operation is quite simple: We only need to calculate the index (hash code) for the given key and then search for the key at the index. However, the hash table could have a collision for the given key, so we follow the quadratic probing scheme to search for it.