Comparing two collections for equality irrespective of the order of items in them

Question

I would like to compare two collections (in C#), but I\'m not sure of the best way to implement this efficiently.

I\'ve read the other thread about Enumerable.Sequen

Answer 1

This is my (heavily influenced by D.Jennings) generic implementation of the comparison method (in C#):

/// 

/// Represents a service used to compare two collections for equality.
/// 
/// The type of the items in the collections.
public class CollectionComparer
{
    /// 

    /// Compares the content of two collections for equality.
    /// 
    /// The first collection.
    /// The second collection.
    /// True if both collections have the same content, false otherwise.
    public bool Execute(ICollection foo, ICollection bar)
    {
        // Declare a dictionary to count the occurence of the items in the collection
        Dictionary itemCounts = new Dictionary();

        // Increase the count for each occurence of the item in the first collection
        foreach (T item in foo)
        {
            if (itemCounts.ContainsKey(item))
            {
                itemCounts[item]++;
            }
            else
            {
                itemCounts[item] = 1;
            }
        }

        // Wrap the keys in a searchable list
        List keys = new List(itemCounts.Keys);

        // Decrease the count for each occurence of the item in the second collection
        foreach (T item in bar)
        {
            // Try to find a key for the item
            // The keys of a dictionary are compared by reference, so we have to
            // find the original key that is equivalent to the "item"
            // You may want to override ".Equals" to define what it means for
            // two "T" objects to be equal
            T key = keys.Find(
                delegate(T listKey)
                {
                    return listKey.Equals(item);
                });

            // Check if a key was found
            if(key != null)
            {
                itemCounts[key]--;
            }
            else
            {
                // There was no occurence of this item in the first collection, thus the collections are not equal
                return false;
            }
        }

        // The count of each item should be 0 if the contents of the collections are equal
        foreach (int value in itemCounts.Values)
        {
            if (value != 0)
            {
                return false;
            }
        }

        // The collections are equal
        return true;
    }
}