Question

Hi say I have three ints: value1, value2 and value3.

How do I best determine if they are all the same?

I tried:

return value1 == value2 == value3

But this said:

Operator ‘==’ cannot be applied to operands of type ‘bool’ and ‘int’.

So I guess it compares the first two which returns a boolean which it tries to compare to the third.

I could go:

return value1 == value2 && value2 == value3;

But this seems to be getting untidy.

Anybody have a good suggestion?

Answer 1

The second seems just fine to me.

As the list gets longer, that could get unwieldy. In which case I’d write an extension method along the lines of AllSame.

bool AllSame(this IEnumerable<int> list)
{
    bool first = true;
    int comparand = 0;
    foreach (int i in list) {
       if (first) comparand = i;
       else if (i != comparand) return false;
       first = false;
    }
    return true;
}

or use the params keyword:

bool AllSame(params int[] list)
{
    return (list as IEnumerable<int>).AllSame();
}

Then you can just write:

if (AllSame(value1, value2, value3, value4, value5)) ...