Question

I have DataTable with two columns Author and Bookname.

I want to check if the given string value Author already exists in the DataTable. Is there some built in method to check it, like for Arrays array.contains?

Answer 1

You can use LINQ-to-DataSet with Enumerable.Any:

String author = "John Grisham";
bool contains = tbl.AsEnumerable().Any(row => author == row.Field<String>("Author"));

Another approach is to use DataTable.Select:

DataRow[] foundAuthors = tbl.Select("Author = '" + searchAuthor + "'");
if(foundAuthors.Length != 0)
{
    // do something...
}

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Q: what if we do not know the columns Headers and we want to find if any
cell value PEPSI exist in any rows’c columns? I can loop it all to
find out but is there a better way? –

Yes, you can use this query:

DataColumn[] columns = tbl.Columns.Cast<DataColumn>().ToArray();
bool anyFieldContainsPepsi = tbl.AsEnumerable()
    .Any(row => columns.Any(col => row[col].ToString() == "PEPSI"));