Professional C# and .NET, 2021st Edition

6Arrays

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Simple arrays
• Multidimensional arrays
• Jagged arrays
• The Array class
• Arrays as parameters
• Enumerators
• Spans
• Indices and ranges
• Array pools
• Bit arrays

CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The source code for this chapter is available on the book page at www.wiley.com. Click the Downloads link. The code can also be found at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp2021 in the directory 1_CS/Arrays.

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

• SimpleArrays
• SortingSample
• YieldSample
• SpanSample
• IndicesAndRanges
• ArrayPoolSample
• BitArraySample

All the projects have nullable reference types enabled.

MULTIPLE OBJECTS OF THE SAME TYPE

If you need to work with multiple objects of the same type, you can use collections (see Chapter 8, “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, records, and tuples, which are covered in Chapter 3.

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 and Initialization

An array ...