Dictionary Syntax
We have explored several ways of storing a collection of the same type of data:
arrays: built-in syntax, unchanging size of the collection
List: generic class type, allows the size of the collection to grow
Both approaches allow reference to data elements using a
numerical index between square brackets, as in words[i].
The index provides an order for the elements,
but there is no meaning to the index beyond the sequence order.
Often, we want to look up data based on a more meaningful key, as in a dictionary: given a word, you can look up the definition.
C# uses the type name Dictionary, but with greater generality than in
nontechnical use. In a regular dictionary, you start with a word,
and look up the definition. The generalization is to have some piece of
data that leads you to (or maps to) another piece of data.
The computer science jargon is that a key leads you to a value.
In a normal dictionary, these are both likely to be strings, but in the
C# generalization, the possible types of key and value are much more extensive.
Hence the generic Dictionary type requires you to specify
both a type for the key and a type for the value.
We can initialize an English-Spanish dictionary e2sp with
Dictionary<string, string> e2sp = new Dictionary<string, string>();
That is quite a mouthful! The C# var syntax is handy to shorten it:
var e2sp = new Dictionary<string, string>();
The general generic type syntax is
Dictionary<keyType,valueType>
If you are counting the number of repetitions of words in a document, you are likely to want
a Dictionary mapping each word to its number of repetitions so far:
var wordCount = new Dictionary<string, int>();
If your friends all have a personal list of phone numbers, you might look them up
with a dictionary with a string name for the key and a List of personal phone number
strings for the value. The type could be Dictionary<string, List<string>>.
This example illustrates how one generic type can be built on another.
There is no restriction on the value type. There is one important technical restriction on the key type: it should be immutable. This has to do with the implementation referenced in Dictionary Efficiency.
Similar to an array or List,
you can assign and reference elements of a Dictionary,
using square bracket notation. The difference is that the reference is through a key,
not a sequential index, as in:
e2sp["one"] = "uno";
e2sp["two"] = "dos";
Csharp displays dictionaries in its own special form, as a sequence of pairs {key, value}. Again, this is special to csharp. Here is a longer csharp sequence, broken up with our comments:
csharp> Dictionary<string, string> e2sp = new Dictionary<string, string>();
csharp> e2sp;
{}
csharp> e2sp["one"] = "uno";
csharp> e2sp["two"] = "dos";
csharp> e2sp["three"] = "tres";
csharp> e2sp.Count;
3
csharp> e2sp;
{{ "one", "uno" }, { "two", "dos" }, { "three", "tres" }}
csharp> Console.WriteLine("{0}, {1}, {2}...", e2sp["one"],
> e2sp["two"], e2sp["three"]);
uno, dos, tres...
If you want to iterate through a whole Dictionary, you will want the syntax below,
with foreach and the property Keys:
csharp> foreach (string s in e2sp.Keys) {
> Console.WriteLine(s);
> }
one
two
three
The documentation for Dictionary says
that you cannot depend on the order of processing with foreach, though the present
implementation remembers the order in which keys were added.
It is often useful to know if a key is already in a Dictionary:
Note the method ContainsKey:
csharp> e2sp.ContainsKey("seven");
false
csharp> e2sp.ContainsKey("three");
true
The method Remove takes a key as parameter. Like a List and other
collections, a Dictionary has a Clear method:
csharp> e2sp.Count;
3
csharp> e2sp.Remove("two");
true
csharp> e2sp.Count;
2
csharp> e2sp.Clear();
csharp> e2sp.Count;
0