Fastest way to find common items across multiple lists in C#

Question

Given the following:

List> optionLists;

what would be a quick way to determine the subset of Option objects that a

Answer 1

Here's a much more efficent implementation:

static SortedDictionary.KeyCollection FindCommon (List> items)
{
  SortedDictionary
    current_common = new SortedDictionary (),
    common = new SortedDictionary ();

  foreach (List list in items)
  {
    if (current_common.Count == 0)
    {
      foreach (T item in list)
      {
        common [item] = true;
      }
    }
    else
    {
      foreach (T item in list)
      {
        if (current_common.ContainsKey(item))
          common[item] = true;
        else
          common[item] = false;
      }
    }

    if (common.Count == 0)
    {
      current_common.Clear ();
      break;
    }

    SortedDictionary
      swap = current_common;

    current_common = common;
    common = swap;
    common.Clear ();
  }

  return current_common.Keys;
}    

It works by creating a set of all items common to all lists processed so far and comparing each list with this set, creating a temporary set of the items common to the current list and the list of common items so far. Effectively an O(n.m) where n is the number of lists and m the number of items in the lists.

An example of using it:

static void Main (string [] args)
{
  Random
    random = new Random();

  List>
    items = new List>();

  for (int i = 0 ; i < 10 ; ++i)
  {
    List
      list = new List ();

    items.Add (list);

    for (int j = 0 ; j < 100 ; ++j)
    {
      list.Add (random.Next (70));
    }
  }

  SortedDictionary.KeyCollection
    common = FindCommon (items);

  foreach (List list in items)
  {
    list.Sort ();
  }

  for (int i = 0 ; i < 100 ; ++i)
  {
    for (int j = 0 ; j < 10 ; ++j)
    {
      System.Diagnostics.Trace.Write (String.Format ("{0,-4:D} ", items [j] [i]));
    }

    System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine ("");
  }

  foreach (int item in common)
  {
    System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine (String.Format ("{0,-4:D} ", item));
  }
}