Multidimensional Arrays

We covered arrays that had a single dimension. If you think of the array that we declared as being along a line, then multidimensional arrays are like squares, cubes and so on. This is possibly a little bit confusing, so at this point I'll just refer you to the excellent lecture slides of M. Capcarrere (Link: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/teaching/05/modules/CO/3/20/Lectures/Lecture12.ppt). The slides in this link explain very well how a multidimensional array works and what you may want to use it for.

For completeness, heres how you declare a multidimensional array.

As you can see, its fairly similar to the array declaration you are used to. The amount of pairs of square brackets used corresponds to how many dimensions you have for this variable.

Accessing elements in the array is just the same as with a single dimensional array. If we take the example of a 2 dimensional map, then the array entries could represent gridsquares. The example below shows accessing the grid refrence 0, 1.

Of course, that code does not really do too much by itself as dataYouGetOut would always return an empty String. Storing information inside of a multidimensional array similar in form to storing in a single dimensional array.

As with single dimensional arrays, you must remember that multidimensional arrays start at the index zero.