Slice that Collection: A Swift guide
What are slices, and how are they used?
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Slices make your use of collections in Swift more efficient. This gives us an opportunity to write efficient code and really get to grips with Indices. Shall we get started, then?
Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging
Prerequisites:
- Some knowledge of Collections in Swift
Terminology
Array: An ordered series of objects which are the same type
Collection: A sequence of elements that can be traversed (as many times as you want) and can be accessed by an indexed subscript
Enumeration: A complete, ordered listing of the items in a collection
Index: This is where files are placed that you want to commit to the git repository. Also known as the staging area.
Indices: The number position given to an Array
Integer: A number that has no fractional part, that is no digits after the decimal point
Offset: In an array or other data structure, the offset is an Integer representing the distance between the beginning of the data structure and the object in question
Set: An unordered collection of values (where all the values are of the same type)
Slice: A slice of a collection that represents a view onto a subsequence of the master collection
Subscript: A shortcut for accessing the members in an array (or any collection or list, depending on the language)
Collections
In Swift, collections (as in other languages) are vitally important. ArraySlices provide a view on an array rather than a new array, meaning that both the initial array and the slice share the same indicies.
This is all covered in my article around ArraySlice, but for review here is a quick summary
The Array Summary
If we have an ages array
let ages = [1,5,12,15,2,26,67,36]we can take the second and third elements of the ages array, and put it into an arrayslice.
