How to “zip” or “rotate” a variable number of lists?

Question

If I have a list containing an arbitrary number of lists, like so:

var myList = new List>()
{
    new List() { \"a\",          


        

Answer 1

Here's an inefficient variant based on Matrix Transposition:

public static class Ext
{
    public static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> Rotate<T>(
        this IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> src)
    {
        var matrix = src.Select(subset => subset.ToArray()).ToArray();
        var height = matrix.Length;
        var width = matrix.Max(arr => arr.Length);

        T[][] transpose = Enumerable
            .Range(0, width)
            .Select(_ => new T[height]).ToArray();
        for(int i=0; i<height; i++)
        {        
            for(int j=0; j<width; j++)
            {            
                transpose[j][i] = matrix[i][j];            
            }
        }

        return transpose;
    }
}

Answer 2

You can do this by using the Select extension taking a Func<T, int, TOut>:

var rotatedList = myList.Select(inner => inner.Select((s, i) => new {s, i}))
                        .SelectMany(a => a)
                        .GroupBy(a => a.i, a => a.s)
                        .Select(a => a.ToList()).ToList();

This will give you another List<List<string>>.

Breakdown

.Select(inner => inner.Select((s, i) => new {s, i}))

For each inner list, we project the list's content to a new anonymous object with two properties: s, the string value, and i the index of that value in the original list.

.SelectMany(a => a)

We flatten the result to a single list

.GroupBy(a => a.i, a => a.s)

We group by the i property of our anonymous object (recall this is the index) and select the s property as our values (the string only).

.Select(a => a.ToList()).ToList();

For each groups, we changed the enumerable to a list and another list for all the groups.