Algorithms

C# – Round up to the nearest 30 minutes

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Here’s how to round a DateTime up to the nearest 30 minutes: When the time is 3:38 pm, it rounds to 4:00 pm. When it’s 5:03 pm, it rounds to 5:30 pm. When it’s exactly 2:00 pm, it’ll round up to 2:30 pm (note: see the What if you’re at the start of a 30 … Read more

C# – Remove non-alphanumeric characters from a string

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The simplest way to remove non-alphanumeric characters from a string is to use regex: Note: Don’t pass in a null, otherwise you’ll get an exception. Regex is the simplest approach for solving this problem, but it’s also the slowest. If you’re concerned about the performance take a look at the performance section below. This example … Read more

C# – Trim a UTF-8 string to the specified number of bytes

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Here’s the simplest way to efficiently trim a UTF-8 string to the specified number of bytes: A UTF-8 string can have a mix of characters between 1 to 4 bytes. When you only take part of the byte array, you may end up cutting multi-byte chars in half, which then get replaced with the replacement … Read more

C# – Select distinct objects based on a property

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There are three ways to select distinct objects based on a property using Linq: These select one movie per year: GroupBy() is the simplest because it doesn’t require any additional code. Distinct() is faster but it’s more complicated. DistinctBy() is the fastest and simplest, but requires the most code (it requires .NET 6 or getting … Read more

Algorithm Explained: Get the max items you can purchase with a fixed budget

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Problem statement: Given a fixed budget and a list of item prices. What is the max number of items you can purchase? You can only buy each item once. Note: This is the Mark and Toys problem from HackerRank. Example: You’re given $10 and a list of items to choose from: A cool coffee cup … Read more

C# – Check if a string contains any substring from a list

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There are many different scenarios where you might want to check a string against a list of substrings. Perhaps you’re dealing with messy exception handling and have to compare the exception message against a list of known error messages to determine if the error is transient or not. When you need to check a string … Read more

C# – Pad a 2D array on all sides

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Padding a 2D array on all sides means adding new rows on the top and bottom, new columns on the left and right, and then copying the original elements to the center of the padded array. It looks like this: There are two approaches for copying the elements. You can either copy individual items in … Read more

Algorithm Explained: Sum two big integers the hard way

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Problem statement: Sum two big integers that are passed in as strings. Return the sum as a string. In other words, implement the following method: Constraint: Don’t use the built-in BigInteger class (note: this is the name in C# and may have a different name in other languages). Do it the hard way instead. If … Read more

C# – Join strings with a separator, ignoring nulls and empty strings

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Normally when you want to join strings using a separator, you’d use string.Join(). However, the problem with string.Join() is it doesn’t ignore nulls or empty strings. Take a look at the following examples: If you want to filter out nulls and empty strings, you can filter the list of strings yourself and pass it into … Read more

C# – Remove a set of characters from a string

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The fastest and simplest way to remove a set of characters from a string is to use StringBuilder + List<char>, like this: I compared this with three other approaches. I did 100,000 iterations with a string with 2500 characters and a list of 15 characters to remove. This StringBuilder approach is almost 2x faster than … Read more