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### MapReduce collapse() method

    int MapReduce::collapse(char *key, int keybytes)

This calls the collapse() method of a MapReduce object, which collapses a KeyValue object into a KeyMultiValue object with a single new key, given as an argument with its length in bytes. The single new value in the KeyMultiValue object is a concatentated list of all the keys and values in the KeyValue object. The method returns the total number of key/value pairs in the KeyMultiValue object, which will be 1 for each processor owning pairs.

For example, if the KeyValue object contains these key/value pairs:

    ("dog",3), ("me",45), ("parallel",1)

then the new KeyMultiValue object will contain a single key/value pair:

    (key,["dog",3,"me",45,"parallel",1])

This method can be used to collect a set of key/value pairs to use in a reduce() method so that it can all be passed to a single invocation of your myreduce() function for output. See the Technical Details section for details on how the collapse() method affects the alignment of keys and values that may eventually be passed to your myreduce() function via the reduce() method.

This method is an on-processor operation, requiring no communication. When run in parallel, each processor collapses the key/value pairs it owns into a single key/value pair. Thus each processor will assign the same key to its new pair. See the gather() and scrunch() methods for ways to collect all key/value pairs on to one or a few processors.

Related methods: clone(), collate, convert()