I have five pushbuttons that refer to a specific pin number. I need an efficient code to set the variable for the pin with state 1. What can I use?

Question

There are 5 push buttons each which correspond to a certain pin let us use 1 to 5 for an example. I want to set a variable, ActiveButton which will be set equal to the the only pin in the one state.

We make use of the concept that there can only be one active push button which means the pin of that would have a state of 1 and the rest would be 0. The long method for this would be to use if else and digitalRead(pin) == 1 for everything but that would be so long on code. I've considered using do while or while loops to stop until it reaches the push button with a state of 1, but I was wondering if there was a more efficient code. I was also thinking if there was something that made use of an array?

Though the idea of like having a simple array return the index which results to a corresponding value, like lets say Array[3] ==1 among all the indices from 0 to 4 feels easy to conceptualize, I believe this can be really taxing on the code and might not be able to be done in a short way.

I've also thought of possibly using switch case, where the variable would be the high state and the case values would be the digitalRead for each pin? But that would be wrong probably because I'm not sure but you can't set the switch variable to be a constant. It would be something like

switch (1)

case digitalRead(1):

case digitalRead(2):

Answer 1

There are 5 push buttons each which correspond to a certain pin let us use 1 to 5 for an example. I want to set a variable, ActiveButton which will be set equal to the the only pin in the one state.

Here is a short snippet of what I think, that you want. This is quite a long shot, since your question is not clear enough.

int ActiveButton = -1; // Initialize ActiveButton with -1 (no button is active)
int button_pins[] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}; //Array with pin numbers of the buttons

void loop(){
    for(int i=0;i < sizeof(button_pins)/sizeof(button_pins[0]); i++){
        if(digitalRead(button_pins[i])){ //if the i-th button was pressed
            ActiveButton = button_pins[i]; // assign i-th button pin number to variable
            break; // Break, since we have found our pressed button, ignore all following pins
        }
    }
}

This will assign the pin number of the pressed button to the variable. The condition in the for loop

sizeof(button_pins)/sizeof(button_pins[0])

will make the code loop over all elements of the button_pins array. sizeof(button_pins) returns the number of bytes in the button_pins array. Then we divide through the number of bytes in the first element to get the number of elements in the array.