Question

I would like to make sure my classes are robust – even if they are simple and seem dumb to an experienced programmer.

Let’s say I have a method as written below that accepts a string[] and returns it as an int[].

public static int[] GetIntArrayFromStringArray(string[] stringArray)
    {
        int i = 0;
        int[] ints = new int[stringArray.Length];
        foreach (var str in stringArray)
        {
            ints[i++] = (str != "" ? int.Parse(str) : 0);
        }
        return ints;
    }

Is the best option to use try-catch and throw an exception? When I try to use try-catch, it seems to have issues with my variables not being in scope but I need them to be in a try-catch to catch any errors with the stringArray being null!

Perhaps I should use this?

    if (stringArray == null) //do something ...

but not sure what to do in the event of an error … do I return a null int[] or throw exception?

(I also have to check that the int.Parse(str) doesn’t fail – I’m getting to that one but hoped it could be in the try-catch block!)

As I said, these are simple tasks that I want to try and get correct now before I develop too many bad habits. Thanks.

Answer 1

    public static int[] GetIntArrayFromStringArray(string[] stringArray)
    {
        if (stringArray == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("stringArray");
        }

        int count = stringArray.Length;
        int[] ints = new int[count];
        for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
        {
            int intValue;
            ints[i] = int.TryParse(stringArray[i], out intValue) ? intValue : 0;
        }
        return ints;
    }