Question

I am going to a directory picking up some files and then adding them to a Dictionary.

The first time in the loop the key needs to be A, second time B etc. Afer 26/Z the number represents different characters and from 33 it starts at lowercase a up to 49 which is lowercase q.

Without having a massive if statement to say if i == 1 then Key is ‘A’ etc etc how can I can keep this code tidy?

Answer 1

Sounds like you just need to keep an index of where you’ve got to, then some mapping function:

int index = 0;
foreach (...)
{
    ...
    string key = MapIndexToKey(index);
    dictionary[key] = value;
    index++;
}

...

// Keys as per comments
private static readonly List<string> Keys =
    "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopq"
    .Select(x => x.ToString())
    .ToList();

// This doesn't really need to be a separate method at the moment, but
// it means it's flexible for future expansion.
private static string MapIndexToKey(int index)
{
    return Keys[index];
}

EDIT: I’ve updated the MapIndexToKey method to make it simpler. It’s not clear why you want a string key if you only ever use a single character though…

Another edit: I believe you could actually just use:

string key = ((char) (index + 'A')).ToString();

instead of having the mapping function at all, given your requirements, as the characters are contiguous in Unicode order from ‘A’…