Operations on an Array Data Structure

Understanding how to perform various operations on arrays is important to mastering the art of data manipulation. In this section, we will go through core operations performed on array data structures. Accessing and modifying individual elements in an array is already covered in the introductory article, so it is skipped in this section.

Below are all the basic operations that can be performed on an array data structure:

One of the most common operation performed on array data structure is to traverse or visit all elements present inside it. This operation is also known as iterating an array. In this operation, we start from index 0, access the value, then move on to index 1, access the value, and so on until the last index.

While working with arrays, for efficiency purposes, we allocate more space for an array than the required amount during initialization, leaving room for future expansion. Later on when there is a necessity, more elements are inserted into the array. At a low level, this insertion of new elements into an existing array is not straightforward and in this article we cover all possible insertion scenarios.

In this article we will go through different scenarios for deleting an element at a given index in an array data structure. For all the scenarios explained below, we take example of an array which has enough memory to store a maximum of 7 elements. But only 5 elements are stored and a variable usedLength is used to store the actual number of elements stored in the array.