Finding Duplicate Values in a Dictionary Using C#

December 25, 2016

Due to a series of blog posts that I’m writing on TFS and MS Cognitive Services, I came across a requirement to identify duplicate values in a dictionary. For example, imagine you had an actual physical dictionary, and you wanted to find all the words that meant the exact same thing. Here’s the set-up for the test:



Dictionary<int, string> test = new Dictionary<int, string>()
{
    { 1, "one"},
    { 2, "two" },
    { 3, "one" },
    { 4, "three" }
};
DisplayDictionary("Initial Collection", test);

I’m outputting to the console at every stage, so here’s the helper method for that:




private static void DisplayDictionary(string title, Dictionary<int, string> test)
{
    Console.WriteLine(title);
    foreach (var it in test)
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"Key: {it.Key}, Value: {it.Value}");
    }
}

Finding Duplicates

LINQ has a special method for this, it’s Intersect. For flat collections, this works excellently, but no so well for Dictionaries; here was my first attempt:




Dictionary<int, string> intersect = test.Intersect(test)
    .ToDictionary(i => i.Key, i => i.Value);
DisplayDictionary("Intersect", intersect);

As you can see, the intersect doesn’t work very well this time (don’t tell Chuck).

Manual Intersect

The next stage then is to roll your own; a pretty straightforward lambda in the end:




var intersect2 = test.Where(i => test.Any(t => t.Key != i.Key && t.Value == i.Value))
    .ToDictionary(i => i.Key, i => i.Value);
DisplayDictionary("Manual Intersect", intersect2);

This works much better.