What is the easiest way to handle associative array in c#?

I do not have a lot of experience with C#, yet I am used of working with associative arrays in PHP.

I see that in C# the List class and the Array are available, but I would like to associate some string keys.

What is the easiest way to handle this?

Thx!

Use the Dictionary class. It should do what you need. Reference is here.

So you can do something like this:

IDictionary<string, int> dict = new Dictionary<string, int>();
dict["red"] = 10;
dict["blue"] = 20;

A dictionary will work, but .NET has associative arrays built in. One instance is the NameValueCollection class (System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection).

A slight advantage over dictionary is that if you attempt to read a non-existent key, it returns null rather than throw an exception. Below are two ways to set values.

NameValueCollection list = new NameValueCollection();
list["key1"] = "value1";

NameValueCollection list2 = new NameValueCollection()
{
	{ "key1", "value1" },
	{ "key2", "value2" }
};