Does this guarantee access the first element of the map?

Question

Map<String, Integer> map = new HashMap<String, Integer>;

...

Map<String, Integer> sortedMap = sortByValue(map);
Integer max = sortedMap.keySet().iterator().next();

What I need is to fetch the first element in the map, which is the max element after sorted.

Edited: The sorted map looks like:

John->100
   Mary->50
   Mike-> 2
   ...

Answer 1

While there are some Map implementations that have a notion of order, this is not part of the Map contract. In particular HashMap does not guarantee any ordering of the entries.

It depends what you did here in sortByValue and if the map that is returned preseves some order.