Question

I’m using streamreader now to read a file of people names, it is a text file, of people first names, so there are obviously duplicates, and i want to be able to display how many people have the same now so for example:

josh
alex
josh
john
alex

I want it to say,

josh 2
alex 2
john 1

but I can’t seem to find an easy way of doing this, what would be the easiest way about doing this,

Answer 1

I’d say use a Dictionary<string, int>.

Dictionary<string, int> firstNames = new Dictionary<string, int>();

foreach (string name in YourListWithNames)
{
   if (!firstNames.ContainsKey(name))
      firstNames.Add(name, 1);
   else
      firstNames[name] += 1; 
}

Of course there are many different paths to a solution, but this is how I would tackle it. I haven’t run this code yet, but this will help you I think.