Question

I’ve the following class:

class Node
{
   public string NameField{ get; set; }
   public string ValueField{ get; set; }
}

And also have a list of Nodes as var test = new List<Node>, I need to make two strings arrays as string[], first contains all the NameField and the second contains all the ValueField, I did the following code:

    string[] NameField = new string[test.Count];
    string[] ValueField = new string[test.Count];
    int i = 0;
    foreach (var s in prefsNameValueArray)
    {
        NameField[i] = s.CTMAttrName;
        ValueField[i] = s.CTMAttrValue;
        i++;
    }

Can I do the same using LINQ, can anybody help me to improve this code?

Thanks in advance,
Ramzy

Answer 1

With Linq:

string[] NameFields = nodes.Select(n => n.NameField).ToArray();
string[] ValueFields = nodes.Select(n => n.ValueField).ToArray();

Linq is not necessarily the most efficient way here since ToArray could create an array which may be too large(due to the doubling algorithm) if you use a query instead of a collection. But it is short and readable (and fast enough mostly).

This is the for-loop version:

int count = nodes.Count(); // in case you want to change the collection type or use a linq query
string[] NameField = new string[count];
string[] ValueField = new string[count];
for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
{
    NameField[i] = nodes.ElementAt(i).NameField;
    ValueField[i] = nodes.ElementAt(i).ValueField;
}