Swift Collection Types

The collections are one of the most used data structure when you are programming so, it is extremely important know the different approach you dispose to work with them.

Collection types are complex data types, and Swift allow use three collection types: Arrays, Sets and Dictionaries for manage related values.

The reliability of these collections is based on the types of values and keys that you can store. When you create an instance of a collection, you need to confirm the type of values that it manages. This means that: you cannot store different types that you previously defined, and you can be sure the type of data you will retrieve when you manage a collection.

Also, thanks to type inference, you can specify the type, or Swift will infere the type.

Collection Mutability #

As well as variables and constants, collections can be mutable or unmutable depending on how was created.

If you store an array, set or a dictionary in a variable, you can mutate the collection, because you can add, remove or change a single or multiple values in these collection.

But, if you store it in a constant, you cannot add new elements or modify the ones with was instantiated.

Diferences between arrays, sets and dictionaries #

Arrays are ordered collections, where duplications are allowed and values can be accessed by a numeric index (position in the array)

Sets are unordered collections where duplications are no allowed, and values can be iterated, but cannot be accesed by an index or key.

Dictionaries are unordered collections composed by key-value associations.

Fundamentals of different collection types #

Arrays #

If you want to create an empty array, you will need specify the data type. There are different ways to create an empty array, this a example.

var numbers = [Int]()

But, if you want to create it with values, you don’t need specify the types. Next, you can see how to create an strings array

var tutorials = ["SwiftUI", "Combine", "AsyncAwait"] 

And, if you need to access to a value, you must indicate the position of the value in the array. But, remember that collections index starts by 0.

let firstCourse = tutorials[0]

The above code will store “SwiftUI” in firstCourse constant.

Sets #

Again, you will need specify data type for create an empty set.

var numbers = Set<Int>()

Create a set with values, is similar to create an array but, in this case, you will need to specify that is a set to don’t create an array

var tutorials = ["SwiftUI", "Combine", "AsyncAwait"] 

But, in this case, as sets have not an index, you cannot use it to access to the data. At least, you can check if the value exists.

var swiftuiExists = tutorials.contains("SwiftUI")

The above code wil store true in swiftuiExists variable

Dictionaries #

And, lastly, you can create an empty dictionary specifying both the key type and the value type

var nameOfNumbers = [Int: String]()

To create a dictionary with values, it is also similar to an array, but you have to write the key of each value. Remember that the keys must be uniques.

var requirements = ["View":"SwiftUI", "Database":"CoreData", "AugmentedReality":"ARKit"]

And, if you want to access to a value, you only need know the index

let database = requirements["Database"]

Happy coding! 👨🏻‍💻