Question

Surely there has to be many ways to optimize the following code, where I basically have to make sure that a lot of textboxes aren’t empty and then read their values:

if (foo1.Text.Length != 0 & bar1.Text.Length != 0) {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo1.Text + ' / ' + bar1.Text; }  if (foo2.Text.Length != 0 & bar2.Text.Length != 0) {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo2.Text + ' / ' + bar2.Text; }  if (foo3.Text.Length != 0 & bar3.Text.Length != 0) {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo3.Text + ' / ' + bar3.Text; }  if (foo4.Text.Length != 0 & bar4.Text.Length != 0) {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo4.Text + ' / ' + bar4.Text; }  if (foo5.Text.Length != 0 & bar5.Text.Length != 0)  {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo5.Text + ' / ' + bar5.Text; }  if (foo6.Text.Length != 0 & bar6.Text.Length != 0)     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo6.Text + ' / ' + bar6.Text;  if (foo7.Text.Length != 0 & bar7.Text.Length != 0) {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo7.Text + ' / ' + bar7.Text; }  if (foo8.Text.Length != 0 & bar8.Text.Length != 0) {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo8.Text + ' / ' + bar8.Text; }  if (foo9.Text.Length != 0 & bar9.Text.Length != 0) {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo9.Text + ' / ' + bar9.Text; }  if (foo10.Text.Length != 0 & bar10.Text.Length != 0) {     output.Text += myStrings[i] + ' / ' + foo10.Text + ' / ' + bar10.Text; } 

Answer 1

I would put the repeated elements in arrays and then loop over them.

TextBox[] foos = new TextBox[] { foo1, foo2, foo3, /* etc */ }; TextBox[] bars = new TextBox[] { bar1, bar2, bar3, /* etc */ };  for (int i = 0; i <= 10; i++)     if (foos[i].Text.Length != 0 && bars[i].Text.Length != 0)         output.Text += myStrings[i] + '/' + foos[i].Text + bars[i].Text; 

Of course, if the elements are really named sequentially you can fill the arrays by looking up the controls from the form’s Controls collection, with the name ‘foo’ + number.ToString().