Question

Assume the following class:

class Person
{
   public string FirstName {get;set;}
   public string LastName {get;set;}
}

Lets say that I have a list or an array of Person object. Is there a way using LINQ to retrieve FirstName property from all the array elements and return an array of string. I have a feeling that I have seen something like that before.

Hope that the question makes sense.

Answer 1

Sure, very easily:

Person[] people = ...;
string[] names = people.Select(x => x.FirstName).ToArray();

Unless you really need the result to be an array though, I’d consider using ToList() instead of ToArray(), and potentially just leaving it as a lazily-evaluated IEnumerable<string> (i.e. just call Select). It depends what you’re going to do with the results.