What is the best data structure to store cities and states in C#?

Question

In my C# program, I plan to query my database for cities and states, and I want to store the information in some sort of list so that I can run a foreach loop. I considered a hash table at first, but I'm not sure that would work since there can be multiple identical keys (cities with the same name). Is there a data structure that can store pairs (city, state) or does the C# ArrayList allow some sort of mapping? Thank you in advance.

Do you need that sort of mapping in a class? You can have a collection of states and a collection of cities. A state can have a collection of cities and/or a city can have a state. — Scott Hannen, Mar 12 '18 at 16:03

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 12 '18 at 14:50

4

I think that you can use 2 data structures for this, such like:

Dictionary<State, List<City>> yourObject

I hope this will help you :)

answered Mar 12 '18 at 14:50

Dina Bogdan

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You could simplify this to Dictionary> if you just want to store the names. – aforank Mar 12 '18 at 15:01

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 12 '18 at 14:51

You can create a tuple with two elements like this:

var city = new Tuple<string, string>("New York", "NY");

Then just create a standard list containing all the tuples, then you will be able to do a for each loop on it. To access the city name you can just do city.Item1 and to access the state city.Item2.

What is the best data structure to store cities and states in C#?

2 Answers2