Professional C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0, 7th Edition

7Arrays

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Simple arrays
• Multidimensional arrays
• Jagged arrays
• The Array class
• Arrays as parameters
• Enumerators
• Structural comparison
• Spans
• Array Pools

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The Wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com on the Download Code tab. The source code is also available at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp7 in the directory Arrays.

The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• SimpleArrays
• SortingSample
• ArraySegment
• YieldSample
• StructuralComparison
• SpanSample
• ArrayPoolSample

MULTIPLE OBJECTS OF THE SAME TYPE

If you need to work with multiple objects of the same type, you can use collections (see Chapter 10, “Collections”) and arrays. C# has a special notation to declare, initialize, and use arrays. Behind the scenes, the Array class comes into play, which offers several methods to sort and filter the elements inside the array. Using an enumerator, you can iterate through all the elements of the array.

NOTE

For using multiple objects of different types, you can combine them using classes, structs, and tuples. Classes and structs are discussed in Chapter 3, “Objects and Types.” Tuples are covered in Chapter 13, “Functional Programming with C#.”

SIMPLE ARRAYS

If you need to use multiple objects of the same type, you can use an array. An array is a data structure that contains a number of elements of the same type.

Array Declaration