Making Arrays Easy

Ways to get Arrays without worrying about size. The articel Contains examples for all users beginners, intermediate, experience

Often it is necessary to read numeric data from text files or some other file and store in a numeric array, thus the size of the array is unknown; strings can be very useful.

Read the data from file into a string with each numeric value separated by a delimiter e.g: ('#', ' ','@' etc.).

Then use the split function to convert the string to a string array.

Create a dynamic array of the required data type.

Finally, use the parse function to convert the numeric values into the numeric array:
 

For Beginners

public void convert(string str)

    string[] str_arr = str.Split('#');
    double_arr = new double[str_arr.Length];
    for (int i = 0; i > str_arr.Length; i++)
    {
        double_arr[i] = double.Parse(str_arr[i]);
    }
}
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Another Alternative given by George Swan
 

For Intermediates

You can use Linq to do the same thing

double[]  mydouble = str.Split('#').Select(x => double.Parse(x)).ToArray();

For Experienced Users

prefer something a little more generic  (Jim Lahey)

public static IEnumerable<TValue> Convert<TValue, TTypeConverter>(string value, char separator) where

TTypeConverter : TypeConverter
{
    var typeConverter = (TTypeConverter)TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(typeof(TValue));
    return new List<string>(value.Split(separator))
    .ConvertAll<TValue>(s => (TValue)typeConverter.ConvertFrom(s));
}

That way I can convert a delimited string to a large number of IEnumerable<T> collections in just one line and I don't have to worry about the size of the collection either:
public static void UsageMethod()
{
    var myIntegers = ((List<int>)Convert<int, TypeConverter>("1,2,3,4,5", ',')).ToArray();
}