Introduction
A Dictionary class represents a dictionary in C# that is used to represent a collection of keys and values pair of data. This article demonstrates how to use a dictionary in C#.
Creating a Dictionary
The Dictionary class is a generic class and can store any data types. This class is defined in the System.Collections.Generic namespace. Before you use a Dictionary class in your code, you must import the System.Collections.Generic namespace using the following line.
using System.Collections.Generic;
Add and Read Data
As other collection classes, the Dictionary class has Add, Remove, RemoveAt and other collection methods. The Key and Value property are used to extract a key and a value from an item in a Dictionary.
The following code snippet creates a Dictionary, adds some data to it and reads data back.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections.Generic;
namespace DictionarySample
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Dictionary<string, Int16> AuthorList = new Dictionary<string, Int16>();
AuthorList.Add("Mahesh Chand", 35);
AuthorList.Add("Mike Gold", 25);
AuthorList.Add("Praveen Kumar", 29);
AuthorList.Add("Raj Beniwal", 21);
AuthorList.Add("Dinesh Beniwal", 84);
// Read all data
Console.WriteLine("Authors List");
foreach( KeyValuePair<string, Int16> author in AuthorList )
{
Console.WriteLine("Key = {0}, Value = {1}",
author.Key, author.Value);
}
Console.ReadKey();
}
}
}
Summary
In this article, we learned how to use a dictionary in C#. Learn more about C# Language here.