C# – How to sort a dictionary

Dictionaries are unordered data structures. Key/value pairs aren’t stored in sorted order. When you want the Dictionary in sorted order, there are two simple options: I’ll show both options. Sort Dictionary with OrderBy() Use OrderBy() (from System.Linq) to sort the Dictionary by key or value. It returns the Dictionary’s KeyValuePairs in ascending sorted order. I’ll … Read more

C# – Filter a dictionary

The simplest way to filter a dictionary is by using the Linq Where() + ToDictionary() methods. Here’s an example: Note: You can use the Dictionary constructor (new Dictionary<string, int>(filterList)) instead of ToDictionary() if you prefer. This produces a new dictionary with the filtered item: Where() produces a list (actually an IEnumerable) of KeyValuePair objects. Most … Read more

C# – Change a dictionary’s values in a foreach loop

In .NET 5 and above, you can directly change a dictionary’s values in a foreach loop. Here’s an example: This outputs the following: You couldn’t do this before .NET 5, because it would invalidate the enumerator and throw an exception: InvalidOperationException: Collection was modified; enumeration operation my not execute. Instead, you’d have to make the … Read more

C# – Loop through a dictionary

The simplest way to loop through a dictionary is with a foreach loop. Here’s an example: This outputs the following: The loop variable is a KeyValuePair<string, int> with Key and Value properties. Instead of using this, you can deconstruct the KeyValuePair into named variables, like this: This simplifies things and makes the loop easier to … Read more

C# – Convert a list to a dictionary

The simplest way to convert a list to a dictionary is to use the Linq ToDictionary() method: This loops through the list and uses the key/element selector lambdas you passed in to build the dictionary. In this article, I’ll go into details about how to use ToDictionary() and show how to deal with duplicate keys. … Read more

C# – Merge two dictionaries in-place

When you merge two dictionaries, you can either merge them in-place, or create a new dictionary and copy the values over to it. The following extension method does an in-place merge of two dictionaries. It puts items from the right dictionary into the left dictionary. When duplicate keys exist, it’s keeping the value from the … Read more

C# – Case insensitive dictionary

If you want a case insensitive dictionary, use: In the Dictionary constructor you can specify how keys are compared. For string keys, the default is a case sensitive comparison. To make it case insensitive, you can pass in StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase. Example I have a table that maps users to devices. The user-to-device mapping gets cached in … Read more