Question

in my application I have an array with 5000 elements. I have to sort these elements.But I am getting error of “Array index Out Of Bound Exception”.
Can anybody tell me what can be the maximum size for the array to sort?

Should I use ArrayList ??

Answer 1

There is no specific limit – you are only constrained by memory here, and at this point the array already exists, so this isn’t a limitation of Array.Sort. For example:

int[] arr = new int[500000];
Random rand = new Random();
for (int i = 0; i < arr.Length; i++) arr[i] = rand.Next();
Array.Sort(arr); // works just fine

I suspect you might (for example) have an IComparable[<T>] implementation that is throwing an error internally? Or alternatively, perhaps this error has nothing at all to do with Array.Sort, and you have simply considered the wrong line as the cause.

The exception’s .StackTrace should reveal everything, of course.

And no: you shouldn’t use ArrayList here. Or pretty much anywhere else.