Accessing a Dictionary.Keys Key through a numeric index

Question

I\'m using a Dictionary where the int is a count of the key.

Now, I need to access the last-inserted Key inside the Dict

Answer 1

Visual Studio's UserVoice gives a link to generic OrderedDictionary implementation by dotmore.

But if you only need to get key/value pairs by index and don't need to get values by keys, you may use one simple trick. Declare some generic class (I called it ListArray) as follows:

class ListArray : List { }

You may also declare it with constructors:

class ListArray : List
{
    public ListArray() : base() { }
    public ListArray(int capacity) : base(capacity) { }
}

For example, you read some key/value pairs from a file and just want to store them in the order they were read so to get them later by index:

ListArray settingsRead = new ListArray();
using (var sr = new StreamReader(myFile))
{
    string line;
    while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
    {
        string[] keyValueStrings = line.Split(separator);
        for (int i = 0; i < keyValueStrings.Length; i++)
            keyValueStrings[i] = keyValueStrings[i].Trim();
        settingsRead.Add(keyValueStrings);
    }
}
// Later you get your key/value strings simply by index
string[] myKeyValueStrings = settingsRead[index];

As you may have noticed, you can have not necessarily just pairs of key/value in your ListArray. The item arrays may be of any length, like in jagged array.