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Generating a n-ary Cartesian product example

I found that Eric Lippert's post here suits a particular problem I have.

The problem is I can't wrap my head around how I should be using it with a 2+ amount of collections.

Having

var collections = new List<List<MyType>>();
foreach(var item in somequery)
{
    collections.Add(
            new List<MyType> { new MyType { Id = 1} .. n }
        );
}

How do I apply the cartesian product linq query on the collections variabile ?

The extension method is this one:

static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> CartesianProduct<T>(this IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> sequences)
{
    IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> emptyProduct = new[] { Enumerable.Empty<T>()};
    return sequences.Aggregate(
        emptyProduct,
        (accumulator, sequence) => 
            from accseq in accumulator 
            from item in sequence 
            select accseq.Concat(new[] {item})                       
        );
 }

Here is Eric's example for 2 collections:

var arr1 = new[] {"a", "b", "c"};
var arr2 = new[] { 3, 2, 4 };
var result = from cpLine in CartesianProduct(
                     from count in arr2 select Enumerable.Range(1, count)) 
             select cpLine.Zip(arr1, (x1, x2) => x2 + x1);
like image 904
Stefan Anghel Avatar asked Nov 30 '25 20:11

Stefan Anghel


1 Answers

The sample code is already able to do "n" cartesian products (it does 3 in the example). Your problem is that you have a List<List<MyType>> when you need an IEnumerable<IEnumerable<MyType>>

IEnumerable<IEnumerable<MyType>> result = collections
  .Select(list => list.AsEnumerable())
  .CartesianProduct();
like image 177
Amy B Avatar answered Dec 02 '25 08:12

Amy B



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