Board Types

Board Types

IReadOnlyBoard

IReadOnlyBoard is the base interface of types storing battleship boards.

Accessing Squares of the Board

• You can access the cells of the board with an index (see also BoardIndex type).
• IReadOnlyBoard implements IEnumerable<SquareContent>. Therefore, you can iterate over the cells with e.g. a foreach loop and you can use Linq to analyze the board content.
• With HasLost you can find out whether all ships on a board are already sunken (i.e. player has lost).

Here are some examples for what you can do with IReadOnlyBoard:

IReadOnlyBoard board;
// ...

// Access a square on the board using its index
if (board[new BoardIndex("A1")] == SquareContent.Ship)
{
    // ...
}

// Iterate over board using foreach
foreach (var square in board)
{
    if (square == SquareContent.Ship)
    {
        // ...
    }
}

// Use Linq to analyze board content
var numberOfWaterCells = board.Count(s => s == SquareContent.Water);

Finding Ship Location

If you want to know whether there is a ship on a given location on the board, you can use the TryFindShip method. The method returns ShipFindingResult.NoShip if there is no ship on the specified cell. It returns ShipFindingResult.PartialShip if there is a ship on the specified cell, but it cannot be said for sure how long it is (because of SquareContent.Unknown cells in front or behind the ship). If a ship was found and the size of the ship could be determined, the function returns ShipFindingResult.CompleteShip.

IReadOnlyBoard board;
// ...
// Assumption: We have a ship on A1-C1 and we know that D1 is water.

var found = board.TryFindShip(new BoardIndex("B1"), out var shipRange);
if (found is ShipFindingResult.PartialShip or ShipFindingResult.CompleteShip)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"We found a ship at location {shipRange.From}-{shipRange.To}");
}

BoardContent

BoardContent implements IReadOnlyBoard. It represents a battleship board that you can manipulate. You can assign values to square using an index. Additionally, you can generate a nicely formatted string representation of a board using ToString().

Note: Typically, you do not need to create a BoardContent instance and write content to its cells. The battleship runtime maintains the board content for you and provides you with the corresponding IReadOnlyBoard.

BoardContent board;
// ...

board[new BoardIndex("A1")] = SquareContent.Ship;