Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to get null instead of the KeyNotFoundException accessing Dictionary value by key?

I currently have lots of Dictionary<string, T> uses in my project, and most of them look like so:

if (myDic.ContainsKey("some key"))
    localVar = myDic["some key"];

It’s not very effecient too, as it does two calls to the dictionary, which can be resource consuming. TryGetValue() is a cool thing, but it just doesn’t do it in one line.

I just want to get null if there is no such key from var v = myDic[key]. How do I do that?

Answer 1

I decided to do it like this:

class MyDictionary<TKey, TValue> : Dictionary<TKey, TValue>
{
    public new TValue this[TKey key]
    {
        get
        {
            TValue value;
            return TryGetValue(key, out value) ? value : default(TValue);
        }
        set { base[key] = value; }
    }
}

It lets me use it like any other dictionary, through square brackets. Since I’m not going to use this with value types as TValue, I think it’s good enough a solution.