Question

Does somebody know how to convert an arraylist to a list of dictionaries?
What do I have? I have an ArrayList (list) with a lot of strings:

            foreach (string s in list)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(s);
            }

output:
klaus
male
spain
lissy
female
england
peter
male
usa
...

As we see there is an order. The first entry is a NAME, second GENDER, third COUNTRY and then again NAME, GENDER… and so on.

Now for clarity I would like to store these attributes in a List of Dictionaries. Every List entry should be 1 Dictionary with these 3 Attributes. Is this a good idea? Whats the easiest way? I just search something to store this list in a better looking collection that is later easiert to handle. I have this:

    List<Dictionary<string, string>> dlist = new List<Dictionary<string, string>>();
    const int separate = 3;

    foreach (string s in list)
    {
        //add list entries to dlist?
    }

Answer 1

No it’s not a good idea. Define a class.

At least something like this:

class Person
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Gender { get; set; }
    public string Country { get; set; }
}

Even better would be to use an enum for Gender, and possibly a class (built-in or custom) for the country.

Anyway, to populate a collection with the above class, you’d use something like:

List<Person> result = new List<Person>();

for (int i = 0; i < list.Count; i += 3) { 
    result.Add(
        new Person { Name = list[i], Gender = list[i+1], Country = list[i+2] }); 
} 

Note that this loop lacks error checking on the count of items in the list, which should be a multiple of three.