Question

What I would like to do is be able to pass any number of variables into a function, manipulate those variables inside of the function, and have access to those manipulations outside of the scope of the function.

Example

void FunctionA()
{
    int x = 1;
    string s = "blah";
    int y = 4;
    FunctionB(out x, out s, out y);
    Console.WriteLine("{0}, {1}, {2}", x, s, y);
}
void FunctionB(out params object[] parameters)
{
    for(int ii = 0; ii < parameters.Length; ii++)
    {
        if(parameters[ii] is int) parameters[ii] = (int)parameters[ii] + 1;
    }
}

After calling FunctionA() the console should have “2, blah, 5” on it. Is there a way to do this short of returning an object[] and parsing out the variables I want?

For clarification, here is what I’m attempting to do. Pass a byte[] into a function along with a slew of variables. Attempt to read information out of the byte[] and assign it to the variables that were passed in. So if I had an int, a string, and another int written to a byte[] and I pass in something like:

int x, y;
string s;
byte[] info = ...;
FunctionB(info, x, s, y);
Console.WriteLine("{0}, {1}, {2}", x, s, y);

It would output the information from the byte[].

Answer 1

No, you can’t.

Here you’ve got a single out parameter, whereas you want several separate out parameters. C# doesn’t support that via params… and params is the only way of getting a varying number of parameters, unless you want to overload it up to the maximum number of parameters you want to support.

params will always copy the values of the arguments into a new array. At that point they’re disassociated from the original variables.