How to get duplicate items from a list using LINQ?

Question

I'm having a List<string> like:

List<String> list = new List<String>{"6","1","2","4","6","5","1"};

I need to get the duplicate items in the list into a new list. Now I'm using a nested for loop to do this.

The resulting list will contain {"6","1"}.

Is there any idea to do this using LINQ or lambda expressions?

Answer 1

Here's another option:

var list = new List<string> { "6", "1", "2", "4", "6", "5", "1" };

var set = new HashSet<string>();
var duplicates = list.Where(x => !set.Add(x));

Answer 2

I know it's not the answer to the original question, but you may find yourself here with this problem.

If you want all of the duplicate items in your results, the following works.

var duplicates = list
    .GroupBy( x => x )               // group matching items
    .Where( g => g.Skip(1).Any() )   // where the group contains more than one item
    .SelectMany( g => g );           // re-expand the groups with more than one item

In my situation I need all duplicates so that I can mark them in the UI as being errors.

Answer 3

I was trying to solve the same with a list of objects and was having issues because I was trying to repack the list of groups into the original list. So I came up with looping through the groups to repack the original List with items that have duplicates.

public List<MediaFileInfo> GetDuplicatePictures()
{
    List<MediaFileInfo> dupes = new List<MediaFileInfo>();
    var grpDupes = from f in _fileRepo
                   group f by f.Length into grps
                   where grps.Count() >1
                   select grps;
    foreach (var item in grpDupes)
    {
        foreach (var thing in item)
        {
            dupes.Add(thing);
        }
    }
    return dupes;
}