Dictionary

Dictionaries

So far, we've worked with single variables of various types and have discovered arrays and lists. There is another kind of variable that is very useful named the Dictionary.

If your intuition about what this kind of variable contains follows from the word itself, you are not far off. A Dictionary acts just like an actual dictionary, which has information to look up (a word) and associated information (a definition).

When creating a dictionary, we need to tell C# the type of our lookup key and the type of the associated information.

Let's say we are trying to store the score associated with each player on our team. In this case, the lookup type will be a string (for the name), and the associated type will be an int (for the score).

Defining a Dictionary

That definition looks like:

var playerScores = new Dictionary<string, int>();

Adding to a Dictionary

And we can add information like this:

playerScores.Add("Robbie Lakeman", 1_247_700);

Finding information in a Dictionary

We can look up information with the same [] bracket syntax.

var score = playerScores["Robbie Lakeman"];

However, if we look up a key that doesn't exist, we receive an exception, and our program stops. Later on, we'll see how to avoid, as well as handle, these kinds of errors.

Changing information in a dictionary

Let's say that Robbie's score has increased by 100 to 1_247_800, and we want to update this information.

We can use the [] lookup syntax on the left-hand side of an assignment to set a value in a dictionary.

playerScores["Robbie Lakeman"] = 1_247_800;

This syntax will overwrite the existing value with the new one. If there was no value for "Robbie Lakeman" then we would be setting a new value.

Keys are case sensitive (value-sensitive)

Since strings are case-sensitive, we need to be careful when using them as keys. The value at playerScores["Robbie Lakeman"] is different from the value at playerScores["robbie lakeman"].

Looping through a dictionary

Like a List, a Dictionary can loop through its contents.

foreach (var playerScore in playerScores)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"{playerScore.Key} has a score of {playerScore.Value}")
}

Since each element in the dictionary has a key part and a value part, the variable playerScore will have a type known as a KeyValuePair. The KeyValuePair has two properties, the Key and the Value. In our example the Key is a string and the Value is an int. This is because the Dictionary is of type Dictionary<string, int>.