Querying data with LINQ

We’ve covered a few different ways to store elements, or sequences of values, in this chapter—the one thing we haven’t talked about is how to get specific subsets of data back out. So far, our game’s loot is stored in a Stack variable, and we can always pop off the next loot element in the order they are stored, but that doesn’t help us when we want to filter down the stack (or any other collection type we’ve discussed in this book) to specific elements that fit predefined criteria.

For example, say we wanted to get a list of all the elements in the Loot stack with a rarity value of 3 or more. We could absolutely use a looping statement, but that leads to a lot of code and manual checks if we wanted to add more parameters to our filter. Instead, C# has a specific set of features for querying data called LINQ, which stands for Language Integrated Query. LINQ is fast, efficient, and, most importantly, customizable...