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Jagged Arrays in C# using example

• By Gurunatha Dogi in C#
• Apr 22nd, 2013
• 24305
• 0

Definition of Jagged Arrays

"Array of arrays" is called jagged array. A jagged array is an array whose elements are arrays. The elements of a jagged array can be of different dimensions and sizes.
In jagged array the length of each array index can differ.
Jagged arrays, can store efficiently many rows of varying lengths.

Syntax of jagged arrays in C#

 
static void Main(string[] args){

 //Syntax of Jagged Array
 int[][] jaggedarray = new int[3][];

}   

Syntax of a jagged array starts with data type ("int") followed by two square braces ([] []) then array name ("jaggedarray") and reference it to same data type with number of rows (declare it in first square braces otherwise it will throw an error).

Now using the jagged array variable ("jaggedarray") lets do initialization.

So our jagged array variable got length of 3 rows to initialize it.

Initialization Process of Jagged Array

 
//Initialization of a Jagged Array
jaggedarray[0] = new int[5] { 99, 999, 49, 79, 59 };
jaggedarray[1] = new int[3] { 199, 1999, 149 };
jaggedarray[2] = new int[1] { 999 };

So we have initialized the jagged array i.e. on index 0 of jagged array we initialized new array of size of 5 with integer data type and assigned the values to it respectively

Same way we also initialized index 1 and index 2 of jagged array as shown in above code.

Now lets display the output

To display output we will use "FOR Loop" to loop through the actual length of an array as shown below snippet of code.

 
for (int i = 0; i < jaggedarray.Length; i++){
….
}

Since jagged array is array of array so we need to loop it again the each loop of "For Loop" by using "For-Each Loop" because every row of jagged array initialized with new array of different sizes.

Lets display the output

 
for (int i = 0; i < jaggedarray.Length; i++){

   foreach (int j in jaggedarray[i]){
   Console.WriteLine("Displaying Jagged Array For Row{0} value {1}", i,   j);
   }

}

As you can see we have nested loop (loop inside loop) because every row of jagged array initialized with new array of different sizes.

Output