Swift: Associative Arrays in UITableView - ios

Question

Pretty new so apologies if this is noobish.
I'm trying to get the key and the value from an associative array to print out as the label text in a cell.
At the moment I have the array:
let users = ["John","James","Liam"]
and I am getting the value for the cell text like so:
cell.textLabel!.text = self.users[indexPath.row]
Which will give me rows of the names in. I am struggling when I add in user ages like so
lets users = ["John" : 36, "James": 12, "Liam": 30]
I get this error:
Ambiguous reference to member 'subscript'
How do I get the cell text to display both the name and age?

Answer 1

If you really need to refer to the data via an array, there are at least two ways you can easily accomplish this. Create a Person object like in the comments, or you can quickly use a tuple structure. The following code works in Xcode Playground (Swift 3, 4).
// - First Approach
struct Person {
var name: String
var age: Int
}
let users = [Person(name: "John", age: 36), Person(name: "James", age: 12), Person(name: "Liam", age: 30)]
// say indexPath.row = 0
print("name: \(users[0].name), age: \(users[0].age)") // name: John, age: 36
// - Second Approach
let usersTuple = [("John", 36), ("James", 12), ("Liam", 30)]
print("name: \(usersTuple[0].0), age: \(usersTuple[0].1)") // name: John, age: 36

Answer 2

You need to define a dictionary and with ages and names and in each cell get from the dictionary the age with the name as key, or you can define a model with name and age like Person and put and use as your datasource Array, which I think is better
class Person{
var age : Int = 0
var name : String = ""
init(name:String,age:Int){
self.name = name
self.age = age
}
}
declare an array of Person in your ViewController
var users = [Person(name: "John", age: 36),Person(name: "James", age: 12),Person(name: "Liam", age: 30)]
In the cellForRow method
let currUser = self.users[indexPath.row]
cell.textLabel!.text = currUser.name + "Age: \(currUser.age)"

Answer 3

If you're coming from a PHP style background, it can be confusing that dictionaries look like associated arrays but there's no way to reference them by index like in PHP. You'll need to reference by the key (the string) or convert them into something which you can retrieve later.
Luckily in Swift you can just use something called a tuple, which looks like this:
let user = ("John", 36)
And you reference the values like this:
let name = user.0
let age = user.1
You can store tuples in arrays, so you can do this:
let users = [("John", 36), ("James", 12)]
let johnAge = users[0].1
You can also give the tuple named parameters but by this point you might as well create a struct. Here's what it looks like anyway:
let user = (name: "John", age: 36)
let johnAge = user.age
Another neat trick with tuples is that if you typealias it you can create it the same way you would a struct, without having to device the properties individually, like this:
typealias User = (name: String, age: Int)
let john = User(name: "John", age: 36)
By this point it's just a case of saving a few lines of code but it really depends on how lightweight you need the user object to be. You wouldn't be able to make it conform to anything in the future, which is why a struct can be a better option. If all you ever need is a lightweight object, tuples are great.