Implementing the IEqualityComparer of T interface for object equality with C# .NET

The generic IEqualityComparer of T provides you a way to indicate whether two custom objects are equal. We’ve looked at equality in a number of posts on this blog – see the link below if you’re curious – and IEqualityComparer fulfils a similar purpose though its usage is different.

Equality comparers are most often used to filter out duplicates from a collection.

Consider the following class:

public class Triangle
{
	public double BaseSide { get; set; }
	public double Height { get; set; }

	public double Area
	{
		get
		{
			return (BaseSide * Height) / 2;
		}
	}
}

Let’s say that two triangles are equal if their areas are the same. IEqualityComparer comes with two methods to be implemented: Equals and GetHashCode. GetHashCode returns an integer and two objects that are equal should return the same value. Here’s an IEqualityComparer implementation:

public class TriangleAreaEqualityComparer : IEqualityComparer<Triangle>
{
	public bool Equals(Triangle x, Triangle y)
	{
		return x.Area == y.Area;
	}

	public int GetHashCode(Triangle obj)
	{
		return obj.Area.GetHashCode();
	}
}

Let’s build a list of Triangle objects:

Triangle t1 = new Triangle()
{
	BaseSide = 2,
	Height = 2
};
Triangle t2 = new Triangle()
{
	BaseSide = 2,
	Height = 4
};
Triangle t3 = new Triangle()
{
	BaseSide = 4,
	Height = 2
};
Triangle t4 = new Triangle()
{
	BaseSide = 3,
	Height = 3
};
Triangle t5 = new Triangle()
{
	BaseSide = 7,
	Height = 5
};
Triangle t6 = new Triangle()
{
	BaseSide = 5,
	Height = 7
};
Triangle t7 = new Triangle()
{
	BaseSide = 2,
	Height = 2
};
Triangle t8 = new Triangle()
{
	BaseSide = 8,
	Height = 4
};
List<Triangle> triangles = new List<Triangle>();
triangles.Add(t1);
triangles.Add(t2);
triangles.Add(t3);
triangles.Add(t4);
triangles.Add(t5);
triangles.Add(t6);
triangles.Add(t7);
triangles.Add(t8);

Now we want to find the unique triangles by area. The Distinct LINQ operator is very useful as it also accepts an IEqualityComparer object:

List<Triangle> uniqueTriangles = triangles.Distinct(new TriangleAreaEqualityComparer()).ToList();

uniqueTriangles will include 5 of the original 8 triangles.

Instead of implementing IEqualityComparer you can derive from the EqualityComparer base class which implements the generic IEqualityComparer of T and the non-generic IEqualityComparer interface. The implementation is very similar to the one above:

public class TriangleAreaEqualityComparer : EqualityComparer<Triangle>
{
	public override bool Equals(Triangle x, Triangle y)
	{
		return x.Area == y.Area;
	}

	public override int GetHashCode(Triangle obj)
	{
		return obj.Area.GetHashCode();
	}
}

You can go with the above solution if you want to make your code available to old .NET clients that cannot handle generics.

View all various C# language feature related posts here.