Advanced Search

Compare iterated types (IEnumerables and their kin) by values (to check for equality)

/ Published in: C#
Save to your folder(s)
When I'm running unit tests, I find it very annoying to have to check equality within loops when I've got two collections of data. I know of no built-in way (let me know if there is one) [Edit: [CollectionAssert](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.visualstudio.testtools.unittesting.collectionassert.aspx) does it. Sometimes you need to turn your IEnumerables into arrays, though, using .ToArray()] to compare two collections' values (such as an array of bytes compared to a list of bytes), so I made this extension method to do it.

Expand | Embed | Plain Text

Copy this code and paste it in your HTML 
  1. public static class Extensions
  2. {
  3.     static void Main()
  4. 	{
  5. 		var actual = new List<byte>();
  6. 		actual.AddRange(0x01, 0xFF);
  7. 		var expected = new byte[] {0x01, 0xFF};
  8. 		Assert.IsTrue(actual.Value.EqualsByValues(expected.Value));
  9. 	}
  10.     /// <summary>
  11.     /// Compare objects by their values.
  12.     /// </summary>
  13.     /// <param name="a"></param>
  14.     /// <param name="b"></param>
  15.     /// <returns></returns>
  16.     public static bool EqualsByValues<T>(this IEnumerable<T> a, IEnumerable<T> b)
  17.     {
  18.         var aEnum = a.GetEnumerator();
  19.         var bEnum = b.GetEnumerator();
  20.         while (aEnum.MoveNext())
  21.         {
  22.             bEnum.MoveNext();
  23.             if (!aEnum.Current.Equals(bEnum.Current))
  24.             {
  25.                 return false;
  26.             }
  27.         }
  28.         return true;
  29.     }
  30. }

URL: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/630263/c-compare-contents-of-two-ienumerables

Report this snippet


Comments

RSS Icon Subscribe to comments

You need to login to post a comment.