Re: hashtable or map? (map inserts not behaving as I expect - and I cant find a decent simple example for hashtable)

I have a list of items that I want to ignore during processing. I read a
list of items from file and populate a map variable. However, only a
subset of the items are being inserted in the map.

The struct for IgnoreItem looks like this:

struct IgnoreItem
{
        //ctors and op== omitted for the sake of brevity

    bool operator<(const IgnoreItem& key) const {
        if ( _stricmp(syb.c_str(), key.syb.c_str()) < 0)
            return true;
        else if (_stricmp(key.syb.c_str(), syb.c_str()) < 0)
            return false;
        else if ( xid < key.xid )
            return true ;
        else if ( key.xid < xid )
            return false;
        else if ( icid < key.icid)
            return true ;
        else
            return key.icid < icid ;
    }

    std::string syb;
    unsigned char xid ;
    long icid ;
};