I don't know VB that well but you could just use SelectMany to flatten the arrays. in C#

    strings.SelectMany(o=>o.Split(","));

I have a list of string elements, each of which can contain a comma separated list of values.  From that, I want to generate a list of all the distinct values in the entire set.

Take the following set of strings for example:



    Dim strings = New List(Of String) From {"A", "B,C,D", "D,E"}

I'd like to turn this into:

    {"A", "B", "C", "D", "E"}

Using linq, I could take each element and convert it into a string array.  The following query will just split each string into an array, but it will stay stuffed in it's own array element.

    Dim fieldsLinq = (From s In strings
                      Select s.Split(",")) _
                     .Distinct()

I want to concatenate the all of the values into a single array of strings.

I could start by joining all the elements with a comma and THEN splitting the single string, but this feels like the wrong approach.


    Dim fieldsJoin = String.Join(",", strings) _
                           .Split(",") _
                           .Distinct()

Are there any better solutions?

Concatenate Split Array from Select Field in LINQ

Answer