Obtaining the min and max of a two-dimensional array using LINQ

Question

How would you obtain the min and max of a two-dimensional array using LINQ? And to be clear, I mean the min/max of the all items in the array (not the min/max of a particular dimension).

Or am I just going to have to loop through the old fashioned way?

Answer 1

You could implement a List> and find the min and max foreach and store it to a List and then you can easily find Min() and Max() from that list of all the values in a single dimensional List. That is the first thing that comes to mind, I am curious of this myself and am gonna see if google can grab a more clean cut approach.

Answer 2

Since Array implements IEnumerable you can just do this:

var arr = new int[2, 2] {{1,2}, {3, 4}};
int max = arr.Cast<int>().Max();    //or Min

Answer 3

This seems to work:

IEnumerable<int> allValues = myArray.Cast<int>();
int min = allValues.Min();
int max = allValues.Max();