The Daily Parker

We're in the home stretch. It's day 23 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge and it's time to loop-the-loop.

C# has a number of ways to iterate over a collection of things, and a base interface that lets you know you can use an iterator.

The simplest ways to iterate over code is to use while, which just keeps looping until a condition is met:

var n = 1;
while (n < 6)
{
	Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}");
	n++;
}
Console.WriteLine("Done");

while is similar to do:

var n = 1;
do
{
	Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}");
	n++;
} while (n < 6);
Console.WriteLine("Done");

The main difference is that the do loop will always execute once, but the while loop may not.

The next level up is the for loop:

for (var n = 1; n < 6; n++)
{
	Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}");
}
Console.WriteLine("Done");

Similar, no?

Then there is foreach, which iterates over a set of things. This requires a bit more explanation.

The base interface IEnumerable and its generic equivalent IEnumerable<T> expose a single method, GetEnumerator (or GetEnumerator<T>) that foreach uses to go through all of the items in the class. Generally, anything in the BCL that holds a set of objects implements IEnumerable: System.Array, System.Collections.ICollection, System.Collections.Generic.List<T>...and many, many others. Each of these classes lets you manipulate the set of objects the thing contains:

var things = new[] { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; // array of int, or int[]
foreach(var it in things)
{
	Console.WriteLine(it);
}

foreach will iterate over all the things in the order they were added to the array. But it also works with LINQ to give you even more power:

var things = new List<int> {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
foreach (var it in things.Where(p => p % 2 == 0))
{
	Console.WriteLine(it);
}

Three guesses what that snippet does.

These keywords and structures are so fundamental to C#, I recommend reading up on them.