.NET Answers

Have you ever had a situation arise where you want to create a function that returns a collection of results and you want the results to be listed in a for each loop? 

Sure you have.  And I bet I know what your code looked like too:

public ArrayList CollectionFunction()
{
    ArrayList ar = new ArrayList();
    for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
    {
        ar.Add(i * (i + 1));
    }
    return ar;
}

public void CollectionEach()
{
    foreach (object o in CollectionFunction())
        Console.Write(o.ToString());
}

But did you know there is a much easier way to write this code and, as it turns out, it’s much more efficient too.

Instead of creating an array in the CollectionFunction() we can have CSharp take care of all the details by using the yield statement in our loop and making our CollectionFunction return IEnumerable instead of the ArrayList.

Here is the modified code:

public IEnumerable CollectionFunction()
{
    for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
    {
        yield return (i * (i + 1));
    }
}

public void CollectionEach()
{
    foreach (int i in CollectionFunction())
        Console.Write(i.ToString());
}

What happens under the hood is that a class is created to implement the behavior we’ve described in the code, meaning that the computation actually occurs AS we are looping through the IEnumerable object rather than building up a list, returning it, and then looping through the results.

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