Delete operation in linear probing

The delete operation is another primary operation on a hash table. It deletes a key-value mapping from the hash table. Nothing is done if the key is absent in the hash table. The implementation is encapsulated in the delete function, which uses linear probing to search for the key in the internal array. Let us look at the algorithm and implementation of the delete operation in a hash table implemented using linear probing.

Algorithm

The delete operation is also an extension of the search operation. Like the search operation, we calculate the index (hash code) for the given key and search the internal array for a record with the given starting from the calculated index. We may need to consider three cases.