I find myself writing a lot of code like this to select one item that matches
var item = (from x in Items where x.Id == 123 select x).First();
Is there a cleaner way of doing it or is this as concise as I'm going to get?
EDIT: Should have said "Cleaner way using linq syntax". I was already aware of the lambda syntax and it's starting to look like this is actually the only way. I did get some useful info though, so thanks to everyone who replied.
var fruit = ListOfFruits. FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name == "Apple"); if (fruit != null) { return fruit.ID; } return 0; This is not the only road to Rome, you can also use Single(), SingleOrDefault() or First().
Select is used for allowing the user to select many items from a list whereas select1 only allows the user to select a single item from a list.
We can remove all duplicates like this by using GroupBy and Select methods provided by LINQ . First, we group our list so that we will create groups for each name in the List. Then we use Select to only select the first objects in each group. This will result in the removal of the duplicates.
The Select() method invokes the provided selector delegate on each element of the source IEnumerable<T> sequence, and returns a new result IEnumerable<U> sequence containing the output of each invocation.
Depends how much you like the linq query syntax, you can use the extension methods directly like:
var item = Items.First(i => i.Id == 123);
And if you don't want to throw an error if the list is empty, use FirstOrDefault
which returns the default value for the element type (null
for reference types):
var item = Items.FirstOrDefault(i => i.Id == 123); if (item != null) { // found it }
Single()
and SingleOrDefault()
can also be used, but if you are reading from a database or something that already guarantees uniqueness I wouldn't bother as it has to scan the list to see if there's any duplicates and throws. First()
and FirstOrDefault()
stop on the first match, so they are more efficient.
Of the First()
and Single()
family, here's where they throw:
First()
- throws if empty/not found, does not throw if duplicateFirstOrDefault()
- returns default if empty/not found, does not throw if duplicateSingle()
- throws if empty/not found, throws if duplicate existsSingleOrDefault()
- returns default if empty/not found, throws if duplicate existsFirstOrDefault or SingleOrDefault might be useful, depending on your scenario, and whether you want to handle there being zero or more than one matches:
FirstOrDefault: Returns the first element of a sequence, or a default value if no element is found.
SingleOrDefault: Returns the only element of a sequence, or a default value if the sequence is empty; this method throws an exception if there is more than one element in the sequence
I don't know how this works in a linq 'from' query but in lambda syntax it looks like this:
var item1 = Items.FirstOrDefault(x => x.Id == 123); var item2 = Items.SingleOrDefault(x => x.Id == 123);
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