Question

I just wanna ask what best way to work around a Two-Dimensional Array (2 Columns) which would store: CandidateName and their respective VoteCount.

What I want exactly to do is to, accept an input from the user say: VOTE John 10 wherein John is the name of the candidate and 10 is the votes that he wanna give him. So I need to store {John, 10} into my array. However, after this my program would once again ask the user for votes so if I enter VOTE Doe 15, the entry {Doe, 15} would then be added to the array. If the user enters VOTE John 2, my array needs to be updated and thus the new value would be {John, 12}.

Currently I use two arraylists: CandidateName and VoteCount and I just rely on their index for pairing. However, this isn’t really reliable so I’m trying to find another way on how to solve this. However, I’m not really a big fan of multi-dimensional arrays.

Can someone please point me out to a good way on how to achieve this?

Answer 1

You should use an Associative Array. In the case of C#, such a collection is the Dictionary.

var votes = new Dictionary<string, int>();
votes["John"] = 10;
votes["Bob"] = 20;
votes["John"] = 15; // replaces earlier setting

If you want to add to the exisiting vote, you will need to check if there is an existing value:

private Dictionary<string, int> votesByPeep; // initialized in constructor

private void AddVotes(string peep, int votes)
{
    if (this.votesByPeep.ContainsKey(peep)
    {
        this.votesByPeep[peep] += votes;
    }
    else
    {
        this.votesByPeep[peep] = votes;
    }
}