Question

I want to define an array of strings but I don’t know the number of strings I’ll need to store in it. Can I define such an array, and how can I insert strings into it?

Answer 1

Better use List like this:

List<string> names = new List<string>();
names.Add(name); ///whatever string you want to insert

Later if you need array of names, call:

string[] arr = names.ToArray();

If you have to use an array of strings then you should know the size upfront. If you don’t know the size, then you can initialize array of some default length (say 10).
The things that you have to do are:

• Keep the count of strings already added in array
• If it reaches the default length, you have re-initialize the array with a bigger length (say 15) and copy all existing strings to this new array.
• You have to keep checks of the boundaries of this array, you don’t want to read from indexes you haven’t used yet (i.e. if the index is greater then count)

So its better to use list rather then doing all this stuff by yourself