Deborah's Developer MindScape

There may be times you need to work with a set of alphabetic letters. Say you need to use "ABCDEFGHIJ" in your application. Now you could hard-code these in your application, but this post shows another technique for generating sets of letters.

In C#:

// Initialize an array with letters
// This one does A, B, ... J
char[] letters = Enumerable.Range(0, 10).Select(i =>
                            ((char)('A' + i))).ToArray();
Console.WriteLine(new string(letters));

// This one does z, y, ... q
char[] letters2 = Enumerable.Range(0, 10).Select(i =>
                            ((char)('z' - i))).ToArray();
Console.WriteLine(new string(letters2));

In VB:

' Initialize an array with letters
' This one does A, B, ... J
Dim letters() As Char = Enumerable.Range(0, 10).Select( _
            Function(i) (Chr(Asc("A") + i))).ToArray()
Console.WriteLine(letters)

' This one does z, y, ... q
Dim letters2() As Char = Enumerable.Range(0, 10).Select( _
        Function(i) (Chr(Asc("z") - i))).ToArray()
Console.WriteLine(letters2)

This code uses the Enumerable Range method to generate a range of values. It then uses the char letter character codes to build the list.

The Console.WriteLine uses one of the string constructors to convert the array of char to a string.

The result is:

ABCDEFGHIJ
zyxwvutsrq

Use this technique any time you need to work with a set of alphabetic letters in your application.

Enjoy!