How do I remove duplicates from a C# array?

Question

You could possibly use a LINQ query to do this:

int[] s = { 1, 2, 3, 3, 4};
int[] q = s.Distinct().ToArray();

Here is the HashSet<string> approach:

public static string[] RemoveDuplicates(string[] s)
{
    HashSet<string> set = new HashSet<string>(s);
    string[] result = new string[set.Count];
    set.CopyTo(result);
    return result;
}

Unfortunately this solution also requires .NET framework 3.5 or later as HashSet was not added until that version. You could also use array.Distinct(), which is a feature of LINQ.

The following tested and working code will remove duplicates from an array. You must include the System.Collections namespace.

string[] sArray = {"a", "b", "b", "c", "c", "d", "e", "f", "f"};
var sList = new ArrayList();

for (int i = 0; i < sArray.Length; i++) {
    if (sList.Contains(sArray[i]) == false) {
        sList.Add(sArray[i]);
    }
}

var sNew = sList.ToArray();

for (int i = 0; i < sNew.Length; i++) {
    Console.Write(sNew[i]);
}

You could wrap this up into a function if you wanted to.

If you needed to sort it, then you could implement a sort that also removes duplicates.

Kills two birds with one stone, then.

This might depend on how much you want to engineer the solution - if the array is never going to be that big and you don't care about sorting the list you might want to try something similar to the following:

    public string[] RemoveDuplicates(string[] myList) {
        System.Collections.ArrayList newList = new System.Collections.ArrayList();

        foreach (string str in myList)
            if (!newList.Contains(str))
                newList.Add(str);
        return (string[])newList.ToArray(typeof(string));
    }

List<String> myStringList = new List<string>();
foreach (string s in myStringArray)
{
    if (!myStringList.Contains(s))
    {
        myStringList.Add(s);
    }
}

This is O(n^2), which won't matter for a short list which is going to be stuffed into a combo, but could be rapidly be a problem on a big collection.

-- This is Interview Question asked every time. Now i done its coding.

static void Main(string[] args)
{    
            int[] array = new int[] { 4, 8, 4, 1, 1, 4, 8 };            
            int numDups = 0, prevIndex = 0;

            for (int i = 0; i < array.Length; i++)
            {
                bool foundDup = false;
                for (int j = 0; j < i; j++)
                {
                    if (array[i] == array[j])
                    {
                        foundDup = true;
                        numDups++; // Increment means Count for Duplicate found in array.
                        break;
                    }                    
                }

                if (foundDup == false)
                {
                    array[prevIndex] = array[i];
                    prevIndex++;
                }
            }

            // Just Duplicate records replce by zero.
            for (int k = 1; k <= numDups; k++)
            {               
                array[array.Length - k] = '\0';             
            }


            Console.WriteLine("Console program for Remove duplicates from array.");
            Console.Read();
        }