Lottery program c# saving and comparing winning numbers in lists

Question

I have seemed to hit a dead-end in my coding of a lottery program in c# and I am looking for some pointer. What I am trying to do is let the user enter 7 numbers, which will be their lottery "ticket" then I want to draw one or multiple 7 digits winning numbers and compare it to the user's number and see how many times they had 5 correct answers, 6 correct answers and so on. This is what I currently am doing

while(a counter < the number of times I want to draw a winning number )
{
 add the users 7 numbers to a list

 add 7 random numbers to a list

 compare and see how many winnings

 track how many times 5 correct, 6 correct, etc

 loop until number of times I want to draw a winning number

}

this does work, but if I draw a winning number 100 000 times, some of the lots will repeat so to say, and i don't want that

this is what I would want to do

1. add the users 7 digits to some sort of list (easy)

2. add 1000(for example) unique winning lots to a list (2, 1, 16, 32, 5, 9, 17 could be a winner for example)

3. compare the users 7 numbers to the 1000 winning lots and see how many times I got a certain amount of numbers correct

can I get some pointers or ideas of how I should accomplish this? maybe I can use a HashSet? since they only allow unique numbers, but how would I add the lots to the list since I don't want to add them like this 7321114181923 but rather 7 32 11 14 18 19 23

Answer 1

Create array list or a int list: Of entered numbers, and of random numbers

"add the users 7 numbers to a list ~ get system input 7 times with loop.

add 7 random numbers to a list ~ Use Math > Random to add numbers to a list

compare and see how many winnings ~ Compare each number of the list to an entered list, array comparison.

track how many times 5 correct, 6 correct, etc ~ this is where a second counter comes in

loop until number of times I want to draw a winning number ~ this can be tracked with another counter "

Sorry, for a text explanation, you gave me text, so I gave you some text, you gave me nothing to work with.

Also, you can use string manipulation functions to add a " " to each printed number.

Answer 2

One simplistic way of doing this would be to store the winning number combination in a list (as a single winning combination), and then you can have a list of lists that holds all the winning combinations.

Similarly, store the user's number combination in a list, and then you can see how many matches those numbers had with the winning numbers.

For example:

private static readonly Random Rnd = new Random();

// A helper function that returns a list of unique, random numbers from 1 to 49
private static List<int> GetRandomLotteryTicket()
{
    var possibilites = Enumerable.Range(1, 49).ToList();
    var ticket = new List<int>();

    for (int i = 0; i < 7; i++)
    {
        // Choose a random number from the possibilites
        var randomNumber = possibilites[Rnd.Next(possibilites.Count)];
        ticket.Add(randomNumber);
        // Then remove it so we don't select it a second time
        possibilites.Remove(randomNumber);
    }

    return ticket;
}

static void Main()
{
    // 5 random lottery tickets added as sample data
    var winningTickets = new List<List<int>>
    {
        GetRandomLotteryTicket(),
        GetRandomLotteryTicket(),
        GetRandomLotteryTicket(),
        GetRandomLotteryTicket(),
        GetRandomLotteryTicket()
    };

    // Normally you'd get this from the user, this is just sample data
    var userTicket = GetRandomLotteryTicket();

    Console.WriteLine($"Your numbers are: {string.Join("-", userTicket)}\n");

    foreach (var winningTicket in winningTickets)
    {
        var matchCount = winningTicket.Intersect(userTicket).Count();
        Console.WriteLine($"You matched {matchCount} numbers " + 
            $"with this ticket: {string.Join("-", winningTicket)}");
    }

    GetKeyFromUser("\nPress any key to exit...");
}

Output