Question

I’m teaching myself to use Visual C# 2010 and I don’t know what data structure to use to store 3 columns of data from an Excel worksheet.

Column A contains person’s names (string), Column B contains person’s age (integer), and Column C contains person’s phone number (string). How do I store this into a data structure in C#?

In C++ I remember creating a vector that could hold a bunch of different data types…How do I do the equivalent in C#? I’ve read that vectors are not used in C#. Should I be using an array or list? Thanks.

Answer 1

The concept of a C++ vector is roughly equivalent in functionality to the generic List<T> class in C#.

As SLaks said, the best solution, given you know the types and that each set of three columns is a “row” in the table, is to create a simple class that holds your Column A, B, and C, then create a list of those:

public class ExcelData
{
   public string PersonName {get;set;}
   public int Age {get;set;}
   public string PhoneNumber {get;set;}
}

public List<ExcelData> fromExcel = new List<ExcelData>();

fromExcel.Add(new ExcelData
                  {
                     PersonName = "Joe Smith", 
                     Age = 34, 
                     PhoneNumber = "[phone]"
                  });

If you’re using .NET 4 (which, since you’re using VS 2010, you should be), there’s a class Tuple, which has several generic overloads and a static helper to create them:

public List<Tuple<string, int, string>> fromExcel = new List<Tuple<string, int, string>>();

...

fromExcel.Add(Tuple.Create("Joe Smith", 34, "[phone]"));

The upside is a built-in, flexible class; the downside is that a Tuple is very general-purpose and so its column names are similarly general-purpose; Item1, Item2, etc.