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tandu-dev
tandu-dev

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HackerRank Birthday Cake Candles challenge

#csharp

HackerRank has a challenge for calculating which birthday candles get blown out.

My C# solution looked particularly elegant to me, so I thought I'd show it here:

public static int birthdayCakeCandles(List<int> candles)
{
        var maxHeight = candles.Max();
        var numOfCandles = candles.Count(c => c == maxHeight);
        return numOfCandles;
}
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Top comments (3)

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pbouillon profile image
Pierre Bouillon •

Hey @tandu-dev, nice solution, thanks for sharing!

I wonder if using the GroupBy would have save some iterations here

public static int birthdayCakeCandles(List<int> candles)
    => candles
        .GroupBy(x => x)
        .OrderByDescending(x => x.Key)
        .First()
        .Count();
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A dictionary might also be a good fit for such a problem!

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tandudev profile image
tandu-dev •

That's definitely a workable solution? Could you go into it a little more? I'm familiar with the => notation for Linq, but haven't seen it used with the method this way. Is this more functional programming?

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pbouillon profile image
Pierre Bouillon •

Kind of, those are just syntactic sugar, it is a body expression 😄