Question

I’m a student working on a lab that parses a pseudo XML file(basically coded our own parser) for data, stores the retrieved elements and data values, and displays (next lab will be adding “add,change,delete” functionality)

I was thinking about holding this read in information in some sort of multidimensional List due to it being dynamic by default. The other suggestion I’ve read over some other questions here at SO is to make a “parent node” class, and just store that in an array.

The problem I have is that at code time there is no way to know for sure how many child nodes a parent node will have. It could be —

<parent>
    <child1>data value</child1>
    <child2>data value</child2>
    ...etc
</parent>

or

<parent>
    <child1data value</child1>
</parent>

I can’t really think how I could code a class to have an unknown amount of variables.

Answer 1

Why not just use a List<List<T>>? Or maybe a Dictionary<string, List<T>>, assuming your parent nodes have unique identifiers?