Selecting the only element from a single element sequence in .NET C#

Say you have the following Singer object and sequence of Singers:

public class Singer
{
	public int Id { get; set; }
	public string FirstName { get; set; }
	public string LastName { get; set; }
	public int BirthYear { get; set; }
}

IEnumerable<Singer> singers = new List<Singer>() 
		{
			new Singer(){Id = 1, FirstName = "Freddie", LastName = "Mercury", BirthYear=1964}
			, new Singer(){Id = 2, FirstName = "Elvis", LastName = "Presley", BirthYear = 1954}
			, new Singer(){Id = 3, FirstName = "Chuck", LastName = "Berry", BirthYear = 1954}
			, new Singer(){Id = 4, FirstName = "Ray", LastName = "Charles", BirthYear = 1950}
			, new Singer(){Id = 5, FirstName = "David", LastName = "Bowie", BirthYear = 1964}
		};

You can use the Single operator to get the only result of an element selector. You can write in two different ways which are functionally the same:

Singer singer = singers.Where(s => s.Id == 2).Single();
Console.WriteLine(singer.LastName);

…or…

Singer singer = singers.Single(s => s.Id == 2);
Console.WriteLine(singer.LastName);

Both will select Elvis Presley. The query was successful because the element selector lambda expression resulted in a sequence with a single element. The Single operator extracted that one element from the – very short – sequence. If it finds more than one element matching the filter or if it finds nothing then it will throw an exception:

Singer singer = singers.Single(s => s.Id == 200);
Singer singer = singers.Single(s => s.Id < 4);

The first line throws an invalid operation exception as the resulting sequence contained 0 elements. The second line again throws the same type of exception because the element selector yielded more than one element.

You can use the operator SingleOrDefault to avoid the problem encountered with 0 elements:

Singer singer = singers.SingleOrDefault(s => s.Id == 200);
Console.WriteLine(singer == null ? "No such singer" : singer.LastName);

View the list of posts on LINQ here.