Question

I have a collection of objects from a database that holds the titles of companies.

I need to get the first letters (char[]) of all the titles distincted (.Distinct()).

Currently I have something like:

public char[] GetBrandsAlphabet()
    {
        using (var dc = ReturnContext())
        {
            var resultBrands =
                from brands in dc.Brands
                orderby brands.Title ascending
                select brands.Title.ToCharArray()[0];

            char[] ret = new char[resultBrands.Distinct().Count()];



        }
    }

Answer 1

return resultBrands.Distinct().ToArray();

However, this might not work exactly the way that you want, since Distinct could, in principle, change the ordering of the elements. I would remove the orderby statement from the sql statement and use:

return resultBrands.Distinct().OrderBy(c => c).ToArray();