Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

10 Dictionaries

In the previous chapter, you became familiar with Swift’s Array type. The Array type is a useful collection when the order of the elements in the collection is important.

But order is not always important. Sometimes you simply want to hold on to a set of information in a container and then retrieve the information as needed. That is what dictionaries are for.

A Dictionary is a collection type that organizes its content by key-value pairs. The keys in a dictionary map onto values. A key is like the ticket you give to the attendant at a coat check. You hand your ticket over, and the attendant uses it to find your coat. Similarly, you give a key to an instance of the Dictionary type, and it returns to you the value ...