Learning C#

Array Lists

Imagine that your program asks the user for input or gathers input from a web site. As it finds objects (strings, books, values, etc.), you would like to add them to an array, but you have no idea how many objects you’ll collect in any given session.

It is difficult to use an array for such a purpose because you must declare the size of an Array object at compile time. If you try to add more objects than you’ve allocated memory for, the Array class throws an exception. If you do not know in advance how many objects your array will be required to hold, you run the risk of declaring either too small an array (and running out of room) or too large an array (and wasting memory).

The .NET Framework provides a class designed for just this situation. The ArrayList class is an array whose size is dynamically increased as required. The ArrayList class provides many useful methods and properties. Table 16-3 shows a few of the most important.

Table 16-3. ArrayList members

Method or property	Purpose
Capacity	Property containing the number of elements the array can currently hold
Count	Property to return the number of elements currently in the array
Item()	Method that gets or sets the element at the specified index. This is the indexer for the ArrayList class
Add()	Method to add an object to the ArrayList
Clear()	Method that removes all elements from the ArrayList
GetEnumerator()	Method that returns an enumerator to iterate an ArrayList
Insert()