Efficient way to work with multiple arrays in AS3 - actionscript-3

Question

I'm creating a puzzle game in Flash/AS3. It uses about 30 to 40 groups of words. What I want to do is to load one random group of words in the beginning of the game and after using them, I want to load another random group and so on. What is the best way to solve this? Should I have multiple arrays which I will select from using switch statement based on random number or should I put them all into one multidimensional array? Every group of words could contain up to 2000 words.

Answer 1

It's better you use xml for creating wordgroups and to pull them easily. So, i mean, it's efficient you use multidimensional arrays.
var wordgroups:Array = new Array();
wordgroups.push(new Array("word1", "word3", "word5"), new Array("word2", "word4", "word6")); //you can easily create whole this multidimensional array with xml
wordgroups.shuffle(); //shuffles array (flashpunk library have this function, you may check it out and clone it's function if you can)
var selectedwordgroup:Array;
selectedwordgroup = wordgroups.pop(); //you can easily take a word group from that array and it removes selected wordgroup from the "wordgroups" array automatically with pop() function.
What about XML stuff
Thats a sample *.xml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<wordstuff>
<wordgroups>
<group>word1,word2,word3,word4,word5,word6</group>
<group>word7,word8,word9,word10,word11,word12</group>
<group>word13,word14,word15,word16,word17,word18</group>
</wordgroups>
</wordstuff>
and this is a sample to pull data from xml (you're going to embed your xml stuff to your game, so, you don't need any url loader object, you can embed it like you're embedding image files into your game, with a little difference)
then you can create arrays with this embedded xml
var pulledgroups:Array = new Array();
var my_xml:XML = WORDSTUFF //that's embedded file
var wordgroups:XMLList = my_xml.wordgroups.group;
var group:XML;
for each (group in wordgroups)
{
var pulledwordgroup:Array = group.split(",");
pulledgroups.push(pulledwordgroup);
}
THAT'S ALL, this single code paragraph, pulls all data at the same time