Category: Advanced Higher

AH – 2D Array Recap

It took us a little while in class today to remember how 2D arrays work, so I thought I might go over it.

A 2 dimentional (2D) array is an array of arrays. So [[1,2,3,4],[5,6,7,8],[9,10,11,12]] is a 3 item array where each item is a 4 item array. This can be written as

[[1,2,3,4],

[5,6,7,8],

[9,10,11,12]]

You might notice that it looks like a grid (or matrix), this is where the 2D comes in to the name. In python we can create the array and assign it.

2d
2D Array in Python

In the code above you can see the the individual elements of the 2D array are accessed using a pair of square brackets [][]. Using the image below we can see the [1][2] is number 7, as demonstrated in the program above.

grid2d

We can use a loop to display each value in the 1st column.

Using a for loop with a 2D array.
Using a for loop with a 2D array.

Or a nested for to display each item in each array

Nested for traversing 2D array.