LINQ GroupBy continuous time

Question

Assuming I have a simple structure that looks like this:

public class Range
{
    public DateTime Start { get; set; }
    public DateTime End { get; set; }

    public Range(DateTime start, DateTime end)
    {
        this.Start = start;
        this.End = end;
    }
}

And I create an collection like so:

var dr1 = new Range(new DateTime(2011, 11, 1, 12, 0, 0), 
    new DateTime(2011, 11, 1, 13, 0, 0));
var dr2 = new Range(new DateTime(2011, 11, 1, 13, 0, 0), 
    new DateTime(2011, 11, 1, 14, 0, 0));
var dr3 = new Range(new DateTime(2011, 11, 1, 14, 0, 0), 
    new DateTime(2011, 11, 1, 15, 0, 0));
var dr4 = new Range(new DateTime(2011, 11, 1, 16, 0, 0), 
    new DateTime(2011, 11, 1, 17, 0, 0));

var ranges = new List<Range>() { dr1, dr2, dr3, dr4 };

What I want to do is group the ranges where they are continuous - i.e. they are continuous if the End value of the previous Range is the same as the Start of the next.

We can assume that there are no collisions/duplicates or overlaps in the Range values.

In the example posted, I would end up with two groups:

2011-11-1 12:00:00 - 2011-11-1 15:00:00

2011-11-1 16:00:00 - 2011-11-1 17:00:00

It's fairly easy to come up with an iterative solution for this. But is there some LINQ magic I can use to get this in a pretty one-liner?

Answer 1

You could use the Aggregate() method and a lambda to group them together. This is, as you say, assuming no duplicates or overlaps:

// build your set of continuous ranges for results
List<Range> continuousRanges = new List<Range>();

ranges.Aggregate(continuousRanges, (con, next) => {
{
    // pull last item (or default if none) - O(1) for List<T>
    var last = continuousRanges.FirstOrDefault(r => r.End == next.Start);

    if (last != null)
        last.End = next.End;
    else
        con.Add(next);

    return con;
});   

Now, if you know the ranges are ordered, you could get away with always comparing the next against the last one we processed, like so:

// build your set of continuous ranges for results
List<Range> continuousRanges = new List<Range>();

ranges.Aggregate(continuousRanges, (con, next) => {
{
    // pull last item (or default if none) - O(1) for List<T>
    var last = continuousRanges.LastOrDefault();

    if (last != null && last.End == next.Start)
        last.End = next.End;
    else
        con.Add(next);

    return con;
});