Question

Hi there I have a bit of a noob question about creating unique variable names in C#.
I would like to make an ArrayList of Enemy objects and I want to call each enemy “enemy[1]”
I would like to make a for loop and I would like to use the value of “i” to add on to the end of the word enemy.
so for instance:

forloop
{
Enemy enemy1 = new Enemy(actual parameters of the enemy class)
Enemy enemy2 = new Enemy();
Enemy enemy3 = new Enemy();
}

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Variables cannot be dynamically named as you desire, but by using arrays or lists (but please don’t use ArrayLists, more below!), you can access via indexes.

Create a List<Enemy> (List<T> is found in System.Collections.Generic)

var enemies = new List<Enemy>();
enemies.Add(new Enemy()); // add as many as you need

Or if the collection does not need to be dynamically sized, you could use a simple array, of which there are several legal syntaxes for creation.

Enemy[] enemies = { new Enemy(), new Enemy(), new Enemy() };

Then you can write your loop and access via the index

// enemies.Count if using List<Enemy>
// enemies.Length if using Enemy[] array
for (int index = 0; index < enemies.Count; index++) 
{
    enemies[index].FireWeapon();
}

Or write a foreach loop

foreach (Enemy enemy in enemies)
{
    enemy.FireWeapon();
}

---

Your notion about using an ArrayList is outdated as of C# 2.0+ (the current release on the market is C# 4.0), or Visual Studio 2005 (2010 is the current market version). It is preferrable to use the strongly typed generic collections found in the aforementioned System.Collections.Generic namespace.