VBScript Arrays

Imagine that you would like to store a list of all the gifts you would like to receive on your wedding day. You want to make a web page that displays a list of all the items. If you were to create a variable for each gift then you might end up having 100 or more variables for gifts alone! However, there is a better solution to this engineering problem.

Instead, you could utilize arrays, which allow you to store many variables(elements) into a super variable (array). Each present would have a position in the array, starting from position 0 and ending with the last gift.

VBScript Creating an Array

We are going to dumb down the example a little bit so that this lesson doesn't get too boring. Let's imagine that we have 4 gifts we want to store in our array. First we need to create an array to store our presents and tell VBScript how big we want our array to be.
As we mentioned, an array's beginning position is 0, so if we specify an array of size 3 that means we can store 4 presents (positions 0, 1, 2 and 3)! This is often confusing for first time VBScript programmers. Below is the correct code to create a VBScript array of size 3.

VBScript Code:

<script type="text/vbscript">
Dim myArray(3)
</script>

VBScript Arrays: Storing Data

Now that we have created our array we can begin storing information into it. The way to do this is similar to setting the value of a variable, but because an array can hold many values you have to specify the position at which you want the value to be saved.
We have four presents that we need to store and we make sure that we don't store two presents in the same position!

VBScript Code:

<script type="text/vbscript">
Dim myArray(3)
myArray(0) = "Clean Underwear"
myArray(1) = "Vacuum Cleaner"
myArray(2) = "New Computer"
myArray(3) = "Talking Bass"
</script>

VBScript Arrays: Accessing Data

We have all the data stored into the array that we need, now we need to figure out how to get it back out so we can print it to the web page! This step is nearly identical to the storing phase because you have to specify the position of the element you wish to display. For example, if we wanted to print out the value of the present at position 0 in our array you would use the following code:

VBScript Code:

<script type="text/vbscript">
Dim myArray(3)
myArray(0) = "Clean Underwear"
myArray(1) = "Vacuum Cleaner"
myArray(2) = "New Computer"
myArray(3) = "Talking Bass"
document.write(myArray(0))
</script>

Display:

Clean Underwear

VBScript Arrays: Accessing All Data

The above example was a good introduction to accessing elements in an array, but it isn't that helpful for printout out all items that might be in an array. If we had 300 items in our array, accessing them one by one would be most time consuming to program.
Below is a piece of code that will automatically go through every element in the array and print it out. The special programming structure this example uses is a For Loop that we will be discussing in greater detail later on in this tutorial.

VBScript Code:

<script type="text/vbscript">
Dim myArray(3)
myArray(0) = "Clean Underwear"
myArray(1) = "Vacuum Cleaner"
myArray(2) = "New Computer"
myArray(3) = "Talking Bass"
For Each present In myArray
document.write(present)
document.write("<br />")
Next
</script>

Display:

Clean Underwear Vacuum Cleaner
New Computer
Talking Bass

Posted in: VBScript