by Dale Fugier (Last updated:  Wednesday, December 12, 2018)

Overview

VBScript supports two kinds of multidimensional arrays, called rectangular and ragged. Why are there two types of multidimensional arrays? What is the difference between the (x)(y) and (x,y) notation? We will cover these questions as well as talk about resizing multidimensional arrays.

Rectangular

A rectangular array is, well, “rectangular.” For example:

Dim MyArray(3,2)

and you get:

(0,0) (0,1) (0,2)
(1,0) (1,1) (1,2)
(2,0) (2,1) (2,2)
(3,0) (3,1) (3,2)

which makes a nice rectangle. A three-dimensional array makes a rectangular prism, and so on up into the higher dimensions.

Ragged

A common practice used by RhinoScript is to simulate multidimensional arrays by making an array of arrays known as ragged or nested arrays. For example:

Dim MyArray
MyArray = Array(Array(1, 2, 3), Array(4, 5), Array(6, 7, 8, 9))

And so dereferencing the outer array gives you the inner array, which can then be dereferenced itself:

Rhino.Print MyArray(2)(0) ' 6

But, you notice something about the indices if we write them out as before:

(0)(0) (0)(1) (0)(2)
(1)(0) (1)(1)
(2)(0) (2)(1) (2)(2) (2)(3)

The indices make a ragged pattern, not a straight rectangular pattern. It is possible to create ragged higher dimensional, but allocating all the sub-arrays can be difficult.

Thus, in VBScript if you say:

MyArray(2,3)

then you are talking to a rectangular two-dimensional array. And, if you say:

MyArray(2)(3)

then you are talking to a one dimensional array that contains another one dimensional array.

Resizing

The ReDim statement is used to size or resize a dynamic array that has already been formally declared using a Private, Public, or Dim statement with empty parentheses (without dimension subscripts). You can use the ReDim statement repeatedly to change the number of elements and dimensions in an array.

If you use the Preserve keyword, you can resize only the last array dimension, and you can’t change the number of dimensions at all. For example, if your array has only one dimension, you can resize that dimension because it is the last and only dimension. However, if your array has two or more dimensions, you can change the size of only the last dimension and still preserve the contents of the array.

The following example shows how you can increase the size of the last dimension of a dynamic array without erasing any existing data contained in the array.

ReDim arr(10, 10, 10)
...
ReDim Preserve arr(10, 10, 15)