Clojure get map key by value
As in many other cases you can use for:
(def hm {:foo "bar"})
(for [[k v] hm :when (= v "bar")] k)
And with "some" you can return the first matching item instead of a list (as probably the original question implied):
(some (fn [[k v]] (if (= v "bar") k)) hm)
There can be multiple key/value pairs with value "bar". The values are not hashed for lookup, contrarily to their keys. Depending on what you want to achieve, you can look up the key with a linear algorithm like:
(def hm {:foo "bar"})
(keep #(when (= (val %) "bar")
(key %)) hm)
Or
(filter (comp #{"bar"} hm) (keys hm))
Or
(reduce-kv (fn [acc k v]
(if (= v "bar")
(conj acc k)
acc))
#{} hm)
which will return a seq of keys. If you know that your vals are distinct from each other, you can also create a reverse-lookup hash-map with
(clojure.set/map-invert hm)
user> (->> {:a "bar" :b "foo" :c "bar" :d "baz"} ; initial map
(group-by val) ; sorted into a new map based on value of each key
(#(get % "bar")) ; extract the entries that had value "bar"
(map key)) ; get the keys that had value bar
(:a :c)