A Little Refactoring: That Ugly Get

I posted for help on converting the newlines ArrayList to an array of String and got a reply that showed how to do it. The trick was the typeof function, which I had forgotten about since C days so long ago. I promised to fix it when I learned a better way and had nothing else to do after dinner, so I decided to clean up the code a bit more. Remember that we had this:

 public String[] Lines { 
 get { 
  // there must be a way to cast this??  
 String[] textlines = new String[newlines.Count]; 
 for (int i = 0; i < newlines.Count; i++) { 
 textlines[i] = (String) newlines[i]; 
 } 
 return textlines; 
 } 
 set { 
 lines = new ArrayList(value); 
 newlines = lines; 
 } 
 } 

It s that ugly get of the Lines property that I m trying to fix. Sure enough, this approach works just fine:

 public String[] Lines { 
 get { 
 return (String[]) lines.ToArray(typeof(String)); 
 } 
 set { 
 lines = new ArrayList(value); 
 } 

You would think that a reasonable language wouldn t have needed two hints that both say, Hey, this is an array of strings. Still, this is much better.