I am a PHP programmer at heart (by that I mean it is what I know best). However I program in .NET for work (its hard to find php jobs). As such, I often find myself wanting to solve quick tasks with an associative array. Unfortunately, they don’t really exist in .net.
What I usually end up doing is create a Collection instead. A Collection allows you to add any object as an item, and you can also assign a String as a key to it. So for example, if I wanted to create a collection of my family, I could do something like:
dim myFamily as Collection = new Collection
myFamily.add("Leah","wife")
myFamily.add("Cal","father")
This is similar to a php associative array, but note that the first argument is the information, or Object, itself. The second argument is the key. In this case I am simply using strings for the Object, but I could have put anything there.
Now that I have my “Associative Array”, which is actually a Collection, I can lookup values like so:
If myFamily.Contains("dad") Then
Response.Write("My father is: " & myFamily("father").ToString)
End If
The downside to a collection is that you cannot edit items in a collection. A workaround is to delete the item, then create a new one with a same key. However, collections really seem to be meant more for static information you don’t want to change. If you are looking to change the items, check out my article The Dictionary Object: similar to PHP arrays.
[...] a previous post entitled Associative Arrays in VB.NET I spoke of using a Collection Object to achieve similar functionality to associative arrays in PHP. [...]
this is not all that useful i want to find whther a certain data exists in the dictionary and accordingly append
why not just use a hashtable
This is an old post from when I was first learning how to program in VB.NET – as a PHP programmer I was trying to get functionality similar to an associative array in PHP. At first I found a Collection, but then later found that a Dictionary object seemed better (as mentioned at the end of this post).
Care to explain why a hashtable is the better solution? I’d appreciate it!
Also, the example has a design flaw…
dim myFamily as Collection = new Collection
myFamily.add(“Leah”,”wife”)
myFamily.add(“Cal”,”father”)
If myFamily.Contains(“dad”) Then
Response.Write(“My father is: ” & myFamily(“father”).ToString)
End If
Your condition should be “myFamily.Contains(“father”)”… The string is never displayed, it is always False, no element “dad” exists…