Arrays

Introduction#

Arrays are specific data type, representing an ordered collection of elements of another type.

In Go, Arrays can be simple (sometime called “lists”) or multi-dimensional (like for example a 2-dimentions arrays is representing a ordered collection of arrays, that contains elements)

Syntax#

var variableName [5]ArrayType // Declaring an array of size 5.
var variableName [2][3]ArrayType = { {Value1, Value2, Value3}, {Value4, Value5, Value6} } // Declaring a multidimensional array
variableName := […]ArrayType {Value1, Value2, Value3} // Declare an array of size 3 (The compiler will count the array elements to define the size)
arrayName[2] // Getting the value by index.
arrayName[5] = 0 // Setting the value at index.
arrayName[0] // First value of the Array
arrayName[ len(arrayName)-1 ] // Last value of the Array

Creating arrays

An array in go is an ordered collection of same types elements.
The basic notation to represent arrays is to use [] with the variable name.

Creating a new array looks like var array = [size]Type, replacing size by a number (for example 42 to specify it will be a list of 42 elements), and replacing Type by the type of the elements the array can contains (for example int or string)

Just below it’s a code example showing the different way to create an array in Go.

// Creating arrays of 6 elements of type int,
// and put elements 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 inside it, in this exact order:
var array1 [6]int = [6]int {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6} // classical way
var array2 = [6]int {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6} // a less verbose way
var array3 = [...]int {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6} // the compiler will count the array elements by itself

fmt.Println("array1:", array1) // > [1 2 3 4 5 6]
fmt.Println("array2:", array2) // > [1 2 3 4 5 6]
fmt.Println("array3:", array3) // > [1 2 3 4 5 6]


// Creating arrays with default values inside:
zeros := [8]int{}               // Create a list of 8 int filled with 0
ptrs := [8]*int{}               // a list of int pointers, filled with 8 nil references ( <nil> )
emptystr := [8]string{}         // a list of string filled with 8 times ""

fmt.Println("zeroes:", zeros)      // > [0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0]
fmt.Println("ptrs:", ptrs)         // > [<nil> <nil> <nil> <nil> <nil> <nil> <nil> <nil>]
fmt.Println("emptystr:", emptystr) // > [       ]  
// values are empty strings, separated by spaces,
// so we can just see separating spaces


// Arrays are also working with a personalized type
type Data struct {
    Number int
    Text   string
}

// Creating an array with 8 'Data' elements
// All the 8 elements will be like {0, ""} (Number = 0, Text = "")
structs := [8]Data{}  

fmt.Println("structs:", structs) // > [{0 } {0 } {0 } {0 } {0 } {0 } {0 } {0 }] 
// prints {0 } because Number are 0 and Text are empty; separated by a space

play it on playground

Multidimensional Array

Multidimensional arrays are basically arrays containing others arrays as elements.
It is represented like [sizeDim1][sizeDim2]..[sizeLastDim]type, replacing sizeDim by numbers corresponding to the length of the dimention, and type by the type of data in the multidimensional array.

For example, [2][3]int is representing an array composed of 2 sub arrays of 3 int typed elements.
It can basically be the representation of a matrix of 2 lines and 3 columns.

So we can make huge dimensions number array like var values := [2017][12][31][24][60]int for example if you need to store a number for each minutes since Year 0.

To access this kind of array, for the last example, searching for the value of 2016-01-31 at 19:42, you will access values[2016][0][30][19][42] (because array indexes starts at 0 and not at 1 like days and months)

Some examples following:

// Defining a 2d Array to represent a matrix like
// 1 2 3     So with 2 lines and 3 columns;
// 4 5 6     
var multiDimArray := [2/*lines*/][3/*columns*/]int{ [3]int{1, 2, 3}, [3]int{4, 5, 6} }

// That can be simplified like this:
var simplified := [2][3]int{{1, 2, 3}, {4, 5, 6}}

// What does it looks like ?
fmt.Println(multiDimArray)
// > [[1 2 3] [4 5 6]]

fmt.Println(multiDimArray[0]) 
// > [1 2 3]    (first line of the array)

fmt.Println(multiDimArray[0][1])
// > 2          (cell of line 0 (the first one), column 1 (the 2nd one))

// We can also define array with as much dimensions as we need
// here, initialized with all zeros
var multiDimArray := [2][4][3][2]string{} 

fmt.Println(multiDimArray);
// Yeah, many dimensions stores many data
// > [[[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]]
//   [[[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]]

// We can set some values in the array's cells
multiDimArray[0][0][0][0] := "All zero indexes"  // Setting the first value
multiDimArray[1][3][2][1] := "All indexes to max"  // Setting the value at extreme location

fmt.Println(multiDimArray);
// If we could see in 4 dimensions, maybe we could see the result as a simple format
    
// > [[[["All zero indexes" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]]
//   [[[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]]]
//    [[["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" ""]] [["" ""] ["" "All indexes to max"]]]]

Array Indexes

Arrays values should be accessed using a number specifying the location of the desired value in the array. This number is called Index.

Indexes starts at 0 and finish at array length -1.

To access a value, you have to do something like this: arrayName[index], replacing “index” by the number corresponding to the rank of the value in your array.

For example:

var array = [6]int {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}

fmt.Println(array[-42]) // invalid array index -1 (index must be non-negative)
fmt.Println(array[-1]) // invalid array index -1 (index must be non-negative)
fmt.Println(array[0]) // > 1
fmt.Println(array[1]) // > 2
fmt.Println(array[2]) // > 3
fmt.Println(array[3]) // > 4
fmt.Println(array[4]) // > 5
fmt.Println(array[5]) // > 6
fmt.Println(array[6]) // invalid array index 6 (out of bounds for 6-element array)
fmt.Println(array[42]) // invalid array index 42 (out of bounds for 6-element array)

To set or modify a value in the array, the way is the same.
Example:

var array = [6]int {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}

fmt.Println(array) // > [1 2 3 4 5 6]

array[0] := 6
fmt.Println(array) // > [6 2 3 4 5 6]

array[1] := 5
fmt.Println(array) // > [6 5 3 4 5 6]

array[2] := 4
fmt.Println(array) // > [6 5 4 4 5 6]

array[3] := 3
fmt.Println(array) // > [6 5 4 3 5 6]

array[4] := 2
fmt.Println(array) // > [6 5 4 3 2 6]

array[5] := 1
fmt.Println(array) // > [6 5 4 3 2 1]