Objective C Arrays
Objective C Arrays
Objective-C programming language provides a data structure called the array, which can store a
fixed-size sequential collection of elements of the same type. An array is used to store a collection
of data, but it is often more useful to think of an array as a collection of variables of the same type.
Instead of declaring individual variables, such as number0, number1, ..., and number99, you
declare one array variable such as numbers and use numbers[0], numbers[1], and ..., numbers[99]
to represent individual variables. A specific element in an array is accessed by an index.
All arrays consist of contiguous memory locations. The lowest address corresponds to the first
element and the highest address to the last element.
Declaring Arrays
To declare an array in Objective-C, a programmer specifies the type of the elements and the
number of elements required by an array as follows:
This is called a single-dimensional array. The arraySize must be an integer constant greater than
zero and type can be any valid Objective-C data type. For example, to declare a 10-element array
called balance of type double, use this statement:
double balance[10];
Initializing Arrays
You can initialize an array in Objective-C either one by one or using a single statement as follows:
The number of values between braces { } can not be larger than the number of elements that we
declare for the array between square brackets [ ]. Following is an example to assign a single
element of the array:
If you omit the size of the array, an array just big enough to hold the initialization is created.
Therefore, if you write:
You will create exactly the same array as you did in the previous example.
balance[4] = 50.0;
The above statement assigns element number 5th in the array a value of 50.0. Array with 4th
index will be 5th, i.e., last element because all arrays have 0 as the index of their first element
which is also called base index. Following is the pictorial representation of the same array we
discussed above:
Accessing Array Elements
An element is accessed by indexing the array name. This is done by placing the index of the
element within square brackets after the name of the array. For example:
The above statement will take 10th element from the array and assign the value to salary variable.
Following is an example, which will use all the above mentioned three concepts viz. declaration,
assignment and accessing arrays:
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
int main ()
{
int n[ 10 ]; /* n is an array of 10 integers */
int i,j;
return 0;
}
When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result:
Concept Description
Passing arrays to functions You can pass to the function a pointer to an array by specifying the
array's name without an index.