Creating a List of a class within the same class?

Question

I'm practicing C# and have only been learning for about a month. I have a question that maybe is a bit on the beginner side so I hope someone doesn't mind answering for me.

I have a class called yourCharacter. In this class sits all the information for someone's character. I want to give the user the ability to create a new character so I've created a method/function to do so. My question is, can I place a function within yourCharacter that creates a List of yourCharacter. Is this doable? Is it bad form to do it this way? Should I be creating this list in my Main class and then calling a function within the main class to do this?

I hope my question is clear enough, please let me know if you need further detail. The only reason I want to do this is because in my head it makes more sense to group my methods/functions with the class it is manipulating and or working with.

class yourCharacter{

     //insert a bunch of variables here


     public static void newChar(){

          List newCharacter = new List<yourCharacter>();

     }
}

Answer 1

What you have there is doable for sure.

A class can contain itself as a member. This might make sense in some scenario, but think about yours and see whether it applies. In your case it seems as if you're trying to have a mechanism to group characters - but it's not a good way to do it. Why? Read on...

Say you had a box. This box contained another box inside... that box could contain another box inside... So in that case, if I made a class which represents this kind of box it might make sense to add that class into itself. Making a class like that represents a system in reality where a box contains other boxes.

What system are you trying to abstract, so that it is useful that a character contains other characters? I can think of something: let's imagine a character in your game can swallow other characters and they'll live inside his tummy...

If you want to group them - you'd likely want to use another class which represents the system under which your characters are grouped like this: Say your game has an adventure party! The adventure party can invite other people to join and they go questing together. Let's say this adventure party has a leader which decides who can join and who can't. You still probably wouldn't make a character which contains other characters... you would rather create a class called "AdventureGroup" with a list of "ordinary" party members and a leader, you would assign a string which represents the "group nickname", and all other kinds of things which represent the group as an entity. Something like that... you get the jist.