C# assigning array element to another array

Question

I am making a program which browses files, puts them into an array, and then the user puts those files in a random order into a new array called playlist.

To be clear I do not want to assign one array to the other array. I only want to assign one of the many elements of one array to another existing array.

How is this done?

Here is all I can think of:

playlist[1] = files[5];

Answer 1

You can utilize the System and System.IO namespace for all that fairly easily.

var files = Directory.GetFiles("directory path");
var playlist = new string[files.Length];

At that point, you'll have two arrays. The files array will contain the full path for every file in the directory you specified, and playlist will be a string array with the same size as the files array.

To get a random file and assign it to the playlist array, you can use the Random class in the System namespace to get a random number between a range.

var random = new Random();
int index = random.Next(0, playlist.Length);

You can use a bunch of logical statements to make sure that you don't copy over one file more than once, and that the space you're copying it to isn't already taken up by a file. But you had the idea idea. Transferring all the paths would look something like this

playlist[RandomPlaylistIndex] = files[RandomFileIndex];

with the lefthand side being the receiving end. That's pretty much the gist of it, anyhow. I can post more code if you're still stuck.

Answer 2

Use Array.Copy where you can define the Start and End of the source Array.

For instance, to copy the 15th element of Files to PLaylist:

  Array.Copy(Files, 15, 1, Playlist, Playlist.Length,1)