Can't build game because of ObjectNames.GetUniqueName, Unity

Question

I'm building my game and after like 4 seconds there is an error that says: Assets\PlayerInventory.cs(228,37): error CS0103: The name 'ObjectNames' does not exist in the current context I'm using the function so that the objects don't all have the same name, but I can't build because of it. I'm using it like this:

string uniqueName = ObjectNames.GetUniqueName(names, ""); this is just adding a number on the end so it would be

Object
Object (1)
Object (2)

and so on...

Why is it not letting me build?

EDIT:

Code snippet:

using System.Collections;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using System;
using System.Linq;
using UnityEditor;
using Photon.Pun;
using UnityEngine.UI;

public class PlayerInventory : MonoBehaviour
{
    // Names taken
    public string[] names = new string[] { "Object" };
    
    void Start()
    {
         string uniqueName = ObjectNames.GetUniqueName(names, "");
    }
}

Some of the using are not needed for this snippet.

Answer 1

BecauseObjectNames is part of the namespaceUnityEditor which only exists within the Unity editor itself and is completely stripped of during the build process.

=> You can't use any of it in the actual released application, it is only for doing stuff within the editor itself.

---

Unfortunately the exact content of GetUniqueName is also not public in the source code but you can implement something similar yourself.

There might be better and more efficient ways but I would go with eg

public static class StringExtensions
{
    // Regex Matches a trailing indexer 
    // e.g. "Example (1)"
    private const string k_IndexMatch = " \\(([0-9]+)\\)$";

    private static bool HasIndexer(string name, out int? index, out string nameWithoutIndex)
    {
        var matches = Regex.Matches(name, k_IndexMatch);

        var nameIndexMatch = matches.LastOrDefault();
        // or in case of older Unity/c# version without Linq
        //var nameIndexMatch = matches.Count == 0 ? null : matches[matches.Count - 1]; 

        if (nameIndexMatch == null)
        {
            index = null;
            nameWithoutIndex = name;
            return false;
        }

        // First group is always entire match, we want only the numeric value which is the second group
        var group = nameIndexMatch.Groups[1];
        index = int.Parse(group.Value);
        nameWithoutIndex = name.Substring(0, name.Length - nameIndexMatch.Value.Length);

        return true;
    }

    public static string GetUniqueName(this string name, IEnumerable<string> existingNames)
    {
        HasIndexer(name, out var index, out var nameWithoutIndex);

        foreach (var existingName in existingNames)
        {
            if (existingName == nameWithoutIndex)
            {
                // Exact match (without index) 
                // in this case either keep your index or if there is none use 1
                if (index == null)
                {
                    index = 1;
                }

                continue;
            }

            if (HasIndexer(existingName, out var existingIndex, out var existingNameWithoutIndex))
            {
                if (existingNameWithoutIndex == nameWithoutIndex)
                {
                    index = index == null ? existingIndex + 1 : Math.Max(index.Value, existingIndex.Value + 1);
                }
            }
        }

        return nameWithoutIndex + (index == null ? "" : $" ({index})");
    }
}

See also .NetFiddle ( older c# )

Example usage

var uniqueName = "Example".GetUniqueName(new []{"Example 0", "Example (1)", "Nope", "Example", "Example (2)"});

=>

Example (3)

since only "Example (1)", "Example", "Example (2)" are overlapping matches and highest free index is 3 .