Accessing contents of an array

Unity Engine
1

Hey there,

Still trying to get to grips with the basic methods of scripting in Unity. I asked what I guess might be seen as a pretty dumb question yesterday regarding referencing gameobjects and I’m back today with one regarding Arrays. Please believe me when I say that I do spent a long time (often hours) trying to work it out for myself, or trying to research the answer before posting on here (And I have read the Basic Scripting Guide) :wink:

Problem I’ve got is that I have about 5 arrays, called array1, array2, array3 etc. Let’s say I had a function that would access one of these arrays and pull the 2nd value from it with a parameter (i) telling the function which array it should be looking at…

function getVal(i:int){

Debug.Log(whatgoeshere?[1])
}

I come from an actionscript background where I could do something like…

trace (this["array"+i][1]);

…but if I try a similar thing in Unity like…

Debug.Log(gameObject.GetComponent["array"+i][1]);

…I get various errors, depending on how I do it.

Thanks in advance…

2 
public var goArray : GameObject[]; //an array of gameobjects, to be populated in the editor

function Start(){
    Debug.Log(goArray[1].name); //print the name of the second GameObject in the array
}
3

Sorry, thanks for taking the time to reply, but I don’t really understand your answer in terms of it helping me. Let’s say that the array was called ‘goArray1’ and I wanted to access it by means of “goArray” + i (with i equalling 1), how would I go about that? If I try methods like those described in my original post I get back something like ‘Type ‘int’ does not support slicing’ etc. I appreciate you posting though :slight_smile:

4

Well an array is just a container variable, not a Monobehavior, so GetComponent wouldn’t do you any good. I think I see what you’re saying now though, you want to have a bunch of arrays, whose names’ have a number at the end, and you want to iterate through them by editing their names’ like a string and appending an int on the end? You can’t really manipulate variable names like that in Unity. You’d probably have to make an array of arrays.

5

One way to do it would be to use a single, multi-dimensional array instead of multiple, single-dimensional arrays. So, instead of having this:

array1[0]
array1[1]
array1[2]
array2[0]
array2[1]
array2[2]

You’d have this:

array[0,0]
array[0,1]
array[0,2]
array[1,0]
array[1,1]
array[1,2]

Then, you could easily reference any particular location via a row and column parameter.

6

Thanks to you both. I did consider the array of arrays, but before I threw myself into it, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a case of me just getting my syntax messed up and the old Actionscript method was actually possible in Unity. Once again I’ve learned something :slight_smile: Many thanks