Purge hash

18.4.0 released Sep 25, 2023

Purge hash

Purpose: Purge hash table.

purge-hash <hash> [ delete ]

purge-hash deletes all elements from <hash> table that was created with new-hash. Note that it does not free any possibly allocated memory for keys or values (see write-hash).

After purge-hash, the hash is empty and you can use it without calling new-hash again. Note however, that "average-reads" statistics (see get-hash) is not reset - it keeps being computed and remains for the life of the hash.

If you use "delete" clause, then all the internal memory of a <hash> is freed, and you must call new-hash in order to use it again; in this case all statistics are reset.

See memory-handling for more on when (not) to delete memory explicitly like this; the same rules apply as for delete-mem.

Examples

Create hash, put some data in it and then delete the data:

new-hash h size 100
write-hash h key "mykey" value "myvalue"
purge-hash h

See read-hash for more examples.