How best can I understand multidimensional arrays?

Question

So, I understand what arrays are. However, I can not seem to find an easy way to understand multidimensional arrays. Can any body offer any guidance?

Answer 1

Single dimension arrays are used to store a objects of same type. For eg: To store employees record or students record.

Assume the case if you want to store students/employees informations from various departments. So multidimensional array comes in the picture.
For eg: Info _info [10][20];
Here first dimension (10) represents the number of department and second dimension (20) represents number of students in that particular department.
_info [0] pointing to the first department students information.
_info [2][3] pointing to the third department and 4 student information.

if you want to intialize the 2d array, you can achieve like this
info[][] = {{dept1stu1, dept1stu2,....},
{dept2stu1, dept2stu2,...},
{.....},
{.....},
.......
};

info[1][0] is pointing to dept2stu2.

Hope this helps you to understand and usage for multidimensional Array.

NOTE: There is a better way to save these information, just to demonstrate the multidimensional array I have used it here

Answer 2

@krishna...what if I define 5 dimension array? then?? how will you show it through matrix?

Answer 3

The best and better way to understand multidimension array is by matrix

Answer 4

In a simple array,
the elements are single elements.

In a multidimensional array, the element are another arrays.

int[] arr1 = { 1,2,3 };
int[] arr2 = { 3,4,5 };

int[][] multiArr = new int [][] {arr1, arr2};