Implementing equality for reference objects using IEquatable and the == operator: summary

We have looked at implementing IEquatable and overriding various equality-related methods and operators in various other posts on this blog. You can look at this page and scroll down to the section called “Comparison and equality” to view all of them.

In this post we’ll put all of these together and implement a joined equality strategy for our reference type.

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Determine if two arrays are structurally equal in C# .NET

Two arrays are said to be structurally equal if they contain the same elements in the same order. Whether or not two elements are the same depends on how you define equality for your custom types. Equality for primitive types, like integers, is more or less straightforward but you’ll need to declare in code what is meant by equality for reference types.

We’ve looked at a couple of strategies to do so on this blog and here we’ll re-use the topic of implementing the IEqualityComparer of T interface.

The non-generic IStructuralEquatable interface has an equals method that accepts an object to compare with and another object which implements the non-generic IEqualityComparer interface. This is an important distinction as implementing the generic IEqualityComparer interface won’t be enough for structural equality. We’ll need to derive from the EqualityComparer base class which implements both the generic and non-generic version of IEqualityComparer. If you try to run the below example with a generic IEqualityComparer of T instance then you’ll get a compiler error.

Note that structural equality is not available for all collection types. Currently only arrays and tuples support it, i.e. they can be cast to type IStructuralEquatable. However, as List objects can be easily converted into arrays that’s not really an obstacle.

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Implementing equality of derived reference types by overriding the == operator with C# .NET

In this post we saw one solution to override the == operator for a reference type to implement equality checking. Here’s a reminder of the Person class:

public class Person
{
	public int Id { get; set; }
	public string Name { get; set; }
	public int Age { get; set; }

	public static bool operator ==(Person personOne, Person personTwo)
	{
		return personOne.Id == personTwo.Id;
	}

	public static bool operator !=(Person personOne, Person personTwo)
	{
		return personOne.Id != personTwo.Id;
	}

        public override int GetHashCode()
	{
		return Id;
	}
}

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Implementing the IEquatable of T interface for object equality in a derived class with C# .NET

In this post we saw how to implement the IEquatable of T interface for a simple Person class. We based our equality logic on the Id property of the object. We implemented the IEquatable.Equals method and also overrode the Object.Equals and GetHashCode methods.

In this post we’ll see how you might go about extending that logic in derived classes. For that purpose we’ll go with another object:

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Using the StringComparer class for string equality with C# .NET

In this post we saw how to use the generic IEqualityComparer of T interface to indicate equality for our custom types. If you need a similar comparer for strings then there’s a ready-made static class called StringComparer which can construct string comparers for you.

The StringComparer class provides comparers for the common string comparison scenarios: ordinal, locale specific and invariant culture comparisons. This is a good MSDN article on the differences between these.

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Implementing equality of reference types by overriding the == operator with C# .NET

In this post we saw how to implement the generic IEquatable interface to make two custom objects equatable using the static Equals method.

You’re probably aware of the equality operator ‘==’ in C#. Let’s see what happens if you try to use it for a custom object:

public class Person
{
	public int Id { get; set; }
	public string Name { get; set; }
	public int Age { get; set; }
}

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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:

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

In this short post we’ll see a way how to make two custom objects equatable using the generic IEquatable interface. Consider the following object:

public class Person
{
	public int Id { get; set; }
	public string Name { get; set; }
	public int Age { get; set; }
}

The object superclass has an Equals method that we can test as follows:

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