GroupBy is an easy way to sort a IEnumerable<T>
collection of items into distinct groups.
In this first example, we end up with two groups, odd and even items.
List<int> iList = new List<int>() { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 };
var grouped = iList.GroupBy(x => x % 2 == 0);
//Groups iList into odd [13579] and even[2468] items
foreach(var group in grouped)
{
foreach (int item in group)
{
Console.Write(item); // 135792468 (first odd then even)
}
}
Let's take grouping a list of people by age as an example. First, we'll create a Person object which has two properties, Name and Age.
public class Person
{
public int Age {get; set;}
public string Name {get; set;}
}
Then we create our sample list of people with various names and ages.
List<Person> people = new List<Person>();
people.Add(new Person{Age = 20, Name = "Mouse"});
people.Add(new Person{Age = 30, Name = "Neo"});
people.Add(new Person{Age = 40, Name = "Morpheus"});
people.Add(new Person{Age = 30, Name = "Trinity"});
people.Add(new Person{Age = 40, Name = "Dozer"});
people.Add(new Person{Age = 40, Name = "Smith"});
Then we create a LINQ query to group our list of people by age.
var query = people.GroupBy(x => x.Age);
Doing so, we can see the Age for each group, and have a list of each person in the group.
foreach(var result in query)
{
Console.WriteLine(result.Key);
foreach(var person in result)
Console.WriteLine(person.Name);
}
This results in the following output:
20
Mouse
30
Neo
Trinity
40
Morpheus
Dozer
Smith
You can play with the live demo on .NET Fiddle