LINQ return items in a List that matches any Names (string) in another list

Martin picture Martin · Mar 28, 2011 · Viewed 59k times · Source

I have 2 lists. 1 is a collection of products. And the other is a collection of products in a shop.

I need to be able to return all shopProducts if the names match any Names in the products.

I have this but it doesn't seem to work. Any ideas?

    var products = shopProducts.Where(p => p.Name.Any(listOfProducts.
             Select(l => l.Name).ToList())).ToList();

I need to say give me all the shopproducts where name exists in the other list.

Answer

LukeH picture LukeH · Mar 28, 2011
var products = shopProducts.Where(p => listOfProducts.Any(l => p.Name == l.Name))
                           .ToList();

For LINQ-to-Objects, if listOfProducts contains many items then you might get better performance if you create a HashSet<T> containing all the required names and then use that in your query. HashSet<T> has O(1) lookup performance compared to O(n) for an arbitrary IEnumerable<T>.

var names = new HashSet<string>(listOfProducts.Select(p => p.Name));
var products = shopProducts.Where(p => names.Contains(p.Name))
                           .ToList();

For LINQ-to-SQL, I would expect (hope?) that the provider could optimise the generated SQL automatically without needing any manual tweaking of the query.