two newbie questions concerning classes and things

[Jnx]

Hi. I recently started learning programming (again) and in my practice game that I've been concepting I ran into some problems.

First, I would like to list all existing instances of a certain class. The class is a country in this game, and it's instances are of course Germany, France etc. What I'd want to achieve is that when the player is given a choice, I'd have some handy way of listing his targets, which would be the countries. Doing this manually for every choice and country would be an immense work and produce a lot of hard coding. Is it even possible to do this?

Second, the country class has methods of course, and I thought that I had partially solved the problem of choosing targets with this trick

Console.WriteLine("Choose target country");
string plrChoice = Console.ReadLine();
(plrChoice).sampleAction();

I thought that that would work but visual studio complains that it's a build error since string doesn't contain blah blah. So is it even possible to have the user fill name for class in code like that?

Sorry if I'm confusing, just starting out this thing.

ps. the "game" is just a simple console application

[Jnx]

Hmm actually if I want the game to list pre-set countries, I can do that with a string array and foreach loop. Tried doing it with a class array but didn't manage. My second question stands though, can I have the player input the name of the instance of country-class that'll have a method called from?

[vart]

So just to be sure

You have some class like

class Test
{
   void sample();
}

And you have a string variable

string className = "Test";

And you want using variable className to call a method from the class Test?

This is what you want to do?

Is method static?

Because otherwise you need an instance of the class first...

[Jnx]

I do have the instances properly spawned in this fashion

Country germany = new Country();

Country being my class' name. I thought that would actually "name" the instances, and that I could then with some class array and foreach loop make the game display those names as a list. But from what I understand, that isn't possible?

Normally I can call a method like this

germany.sampleMethod();

but what I wanted to do was make the user able to choose from which instance a certain method is called. The methods change the class' variables so essentially player is supposed to choose what country their choice affects.

[vart]

I would create a dictionary of countries and use name as a key. Then I can use this dictionary to access country by name

  countryList["Germany"].sampleMethod();

[itsme86]

Why not include Name as a property of Country?

class Country
{
    public string Name { get; private set; }

    public Country(string name)
    {
        Name = name;
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        return Name;
    }
}

And then you instantiate it like this:

Country germany = new Country("Germany");

Now your players can each have their own list of countries:

class Player
{
    private List<Country> _countries = new List<Country>();
    public List<Country> Countries { get { return _countries; } }
}

Now you're looking at some pretty usable classes:

Player player1 = new Player();
Country germany = new Country("Germany");

player1.Countries.Add(germany);

foreach(Country country in player1.Countries)
    Console.WriteLine(country);

[Mario F.]

To make it clear, in istme86 suggestion above, overriding the ToString() method is what will greatly facilitate the usage of this class, as is demonstrated in lines 6 and 7 of the last code snippet.