Question

Is it possible to use an object as a key for a Dictonary<object, ...> in such a way that the Dictionary treats objects as equal only if they are identical?

For example, in the code below, I want Line 2 to return 11 instead of 12:

Dictionary<object, int> dict = new Dictionary<object, int>();
object a = new Uri("http://www.google.com");
object b = new Uri("http://www.google.com");

dict[a] = 11;
dict[b] = 12;

Console.WriteLine(a == b);  // Line 1. Returns False, because a and b are different objects.
Console.WriteLine(dict[a]); // Line 2. Returns 12
Console.WriteLine(dict[b]); // Line 3. Returns 12

The current Dictionary implementation uses object.Equals() and object.GetHashCode() on the keys; but I am looking for a different kind of dictionary that uses the object’s identity as a key (instead of the object’s value). Is there such a Dictionary in .NET or do I have to implement it from scratch?

Answer 1

You don’t need to build your own dictionary – you need to build your own implementation of IEqualityComparer<T> which uses identity for both hashing and equality. I don’t think such a thing exists in the framework, but it’s easy enough to build due to RuntimeHelpers.GetHashCode.

public sealed class IdentityEqualityComparer<T> : IEqualityComparer<T>
    where T : class
{
    public int GetHashCode(T value)
    {
        return RuntimeHelpers.GetHashCode(value);
    }

    public bool Equals(T left, T right)
    {
        return left == right; // Reference identity comparison
    }
}

I’ve restricted T to be a reference type so that you’ll end up with objects in the dictionary; if you used this for value types you could get some odd results. (I don’t know offhand how that would work; I suspect it wouldn’t.)

With that in place, the rest is easy. For example:

Dictionary<string, int> identityDictionary =
    new Dictionary<string, int>(new IdentityEqualityComparer<string>());