Get Dictionary Key by Value in C#

1. Get Dictionary Key by Value With the foreach Loop in C
2. Get Dictionary Key by Value With the Linq Method in C

This tutorial will introduce methods to get a dictionary key with value in C#.

Get Dictionary Key by Value With the foreach Loop in C

Unfortunately, there is no built-in method for getting the key by value from a dictionary in C#. We have to rely on some user-defined approaches to achieve this goal. The foreach loop is used to iterate through a data structure. We can use the foreach loop with an if statement to get the key by value from a dictionary in C#. The following code example shows us how to get a dictionary key by value with the foreach loop in C#.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

namespace get_dictionary_key_by_value
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Dictionary<string, string> types = new Dictionary<string, string>()
            {
                {"1", "one"},
                {"2", "two"},
                {"3", "three"}
            };
            string key = "";
            foreach(var pair in types)
            {
                if(pair.Value == "one")
                {
                    key = pair.Key;
                }
            }
            Console.WriteLine(key);
        }
    }
}

Output:

1

We created the dictionary types and iterated through types with a foreach loop to find the key associated with the value one. We used the foreach loop to iterate through each pair in the types dictionary and checked whether each pair’s value matches one. If a pair value pair.value matches one, we store the key of the pair inside the key string using key = pair.key.

Get Dictionary Key by Value With the Linq Method in C

The Linq or language integrated query is used to integrate the functionality of SQL queries in C#. We can use Linq to get the dictionary key by dictionary value. See the following code example.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

namespace get_dictionary_key_by_value
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Dictionary<string, string> types = new Dictionary<string, string>()
            {
                {"1", "one"},
                {"2", "two"},
                {"3", "three"}
            };
            var myKey = types.FirstOrDefault(x => x.Value == "one").Key;
            Console.WriteLine(myKey);
        }
    }
}

Output:

1

We created the dictionary types and saved the key associated with the value one inside the myKey string using Linq in C#.

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