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What is the purpose of the HashSet collection in C#?

Revati S Misra27903-Nov-2023

What is the purpose of the HashSet<T> collection in C#?

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Updated on 05-Nov-2023
Revati S Misra

Revati S Misra

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Aryan Kumar

Aryan Kumar

05-Nov-2023

The HashSet collection in C# serves the purpose of storing a collection of unique elements, ensuring that each element appears only once in the collection. It is specifically designed to provide efficient look-up and containment operations for distinct values. Here are the key purposes and characteristics of HashSet:

Uniqueness: The primary purpose of a HashSet is to store distinct elements. It enforces uniqueness, meaning that you cannot add the same element to the set multiple times.

Fast Containment Checking: HashSet offers very fast operations for checking whether an element is contained in the set or not. The time complexity for checking containment is generally O(1), making it an excellent choice for tasks that involve membership testing.

Performance: Hashing is used to achieve this fast containment checking. HashSet is designed to have efficient add, remove, and lookup operations. These operations are typically much faster than searching for elements in a list or an array.

No Duplicate Values: When you add an element to a HashSet, it will automatically ensure that only one copy of the element is stored, and any duplicates will be ignored.

No Specific Order: Elements in a HashSet are not stored in any particular order. You should not rely on the order of elements in a HashSet. If you need to maintain a specific order, you should consider using other collections like List or LinkedList.

Use Cases:

  • Duplicate Removal: HashSet is commonly used to remove duplicate elements from a collection or sequence. You can add all elements to a HashSet, and it will automatically eliminate duplicates.
  • Efficient Containment Checks: When you need to check whether a particular item is present in a collection efficiently, a HashSet can offer a significant performance advantage over other data structures.

Set Operations: HashSet supports set operations like union, intersection, and difference. You can perform operations on two or more sets to combine, find common elements, or identify differences between them.

Collection Initializer: You can use collection initializer syntax to create and populate a HashSet in a single statement.

Here's an example of using a HashSet to eliminate duplicate values from a list:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        List<int> numbersWithDuplicates = new List<int> { 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5 };
        HashSet<int> uniqueNumbers = new HashSet<int>(numbersWithDuplicates);

        foreach (int number in uniqueNumbers)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(number); // Output: 1 2 3 4 5
        }
    }
}

In this example, the HashSet uniqueNumbers is used to store only the unique elements from the list numbersWithDuplicates. It efficiently eliminates the duplicate values.

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