Insert operation in separate chaining

The insert operation is another primary operation on a hash table and is used to insert a key-value mapping(Record) into the hash table. If the key is already in the hash table, the insert operation updates its value to the new value supplied. The implementation is encapsulated in the insert function, which uses separate chaining to search for the key first. Let us look at the algorithm and implementation of the insert operation in a hash table implemented using separate chaining.

Algorithm

The insert operation is just an extension of the search operation. Like the search operation, we calculate the index (hash code) for the given key and search the linked list at that index for a record with the given key. We need to consider two cases.