How to convert List to Map in Kotlin?

If you have duplicates in your list that you don't want to lose, you can do this using groupBy.

Otherwise, like everyone else said, use associate/By/With (which in the case of duplicates, I believe, will only return the last value with that key).

An example grouping a list of people by age:

class Person(val name: String, val age: Int)

fun main() {
    val people = listOf(Person("Sue Helen", 31), Person("JR", 25), Person("Pamela", 31))

    val duplicatesKept = people.groupBy { it.age }
    val duplicatesLost = people.associateBy({ it.age }, { it })

    println(duplicatesKept)
    println(duplicatesLost)
}

Results:

{31=[Person@41629346, Person@4eec7777], 25=[Person@3b07d329]}
{31=Person@4eec7777, 25=Person@3b07d329}

You have two choices:

The first and most performant is to use associateBy function that takes two lambdas for generating the key and value, and inlines the creation of the map:

val map = friends.associateBy({it.facebookId}, {it.points})

The second, less performant, is to use the standard map function to create a list of Pair which can be used by toMap to generate the final map:

val map = friends.map { it.facebookId to it.points }.toMap()

From List to Map with associate function

With Kotlin 1.3, List has a function called associate. associate has the following declaration:

fun <T, K, V> Iterable<T>.associate(transform: (T) -> Pair<K, V>): Map<K, V>

Returns a Map containing key-value pairs provided by transform function applied to elements of the given collection.

Usage:

class Person(val name: String, val id: Int)

fun main() {
    val friends = listOf(Person("Sue Helen", 1), Person("JR", 2), Person("Pamela", 3))
    val map = friends.associate({ Pair(it.id, it.name) })
    //val map = friends.associate({ it.id to it.name }) // also works

    println(map) // prints: {1=Sue Helen, 2=JR, 3=Pamela}
}    

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From List to Map with associateBy function

With Kotlin, List has a function called associateBy. associateBy has the following declaration:

fun <T, K, V> Iterable<T>.associateBy(keySelector: (T) -> K, valueTransform: (T) -> V): Map<K, V>

Returns a Map containing the values provided by valueTransform and indexed by keySelector functions applied to elements of the given collection.

Usage:

class Person(val name: String, val id: Int)

fun main() {
    val friends = listOf(Person("Sue Helen", 1), Person("JR", 2), Person("Pamela", 3))
    val map = friends.associateBy(keySelector = { person -> person.id }, valueTransform = { person -> person.name })
    //val map = friends.associateBy({ it.id }, { it.name }) // also works

    println(map) // prints: {1=Sue Helen, 2=JR, 3=Pamela}
}