Structurally compare two arrays in .NET

In this post we saw how to determine if two arrays are structurally equal in .NET. Two arrays are said to be structurally equal if they contain the same elements in the same order.

Structural equality has a comparison counterpart: IStructuralComparable. It determines if an array comes before or after or is equal to another array based on the elements within it.

The Compare method returns an integer that follows the conventions of IComparer.Compare. We’ll need to override the non-generic IComparer interface.

Let’s reuse the Triangle object from the IStructuralEquatable post with a method to calculate its area:

public class Triangle
{
	public double BaseSide { get; set; }
	public double Height { get; set; }
        public double GetArea()
	{
		return (BaseSide * Height) / 2;
	}
}

We’ll compare two triangles based on their areas so we’ll implement the following comparer:

public class TriagleSizeComparer : IComparer
{
	private int Compare(Triangle x, Triangle y)
	{
		return x.GetArea().CompareTo(y.GetArea());
	}

	public int Compare(object x, object y)
	{
		return Compare((Triangle)x, (Triangle)y);
	}
}

We have two following two Triangle lists:

List triangleListOne = new List()
{
	new Triangle(){BaseSide = 2, Height = 4},
	new Triangle(){BaseSide = 4, Height = 5},
	new Triangle(){BaseSide = 5, Height = 9},
	new Triangle(){BaseSide = 3, Height = 8}
};

List triangleListTwo = new List()
{
	new Triangle(){BaseSide = 2, Height = 4},
	new Triangle(){BaseSide = 4, Height = 5},
	new Triangle(){BaseSide = 5, Height = 9},
	new Triangle(){BaseSide = 3, Height = 8}
};

Just like in the case of IStructuralEquatable we need to explicitly convert the list to an array and declare it as an interface type:

IStructuralComparable comparableArrayBase = triangleListOne.ToArray();
int compare = comparableArrayBase.CompareTo(triangleListTwo.ToArray(), new TriagleSizeComparer());

“compare” results in 0 as the two arrays are equal. You can change the base and height properties of any triangle in the array and you’ll see the following results:

• “compare” will be 1 is triangleListOne comes first in the order
• “compare” will be -1 if triangleListTwo comes first instead

View all various C# language feature related posts here.