Day 8: What is IEnumerable?

Hello there!👋👋👋 Today I’m gonna share with you one of the cool types that .NET provides for storing and managing collection of objects. We already talk about arrays and List but I want to take the space to blog about the IEnumerable interface.

In .NET we can divide the types for collections into 3 categories:

1. Interfaces that define standard collection protocols.
2. Ready-to-use collection classes (list, dictionaries, etc.)
3. Base classes for writing application specific collections

This time we are going to focus on the first one. Exposes an enumerator, which supports a simple iteration over a non-generic collection. IEnumerable contains a single method, GetEnumerator, which returns an IEnumerator interface. IEnumerator provides the ability to iterate through the collection with a for-each statement.

Key Points:

• IEnumerable interface is a generic interface which allows looping over generic or non-generic lists.
• IEnumerable interface also works with linq query expression.
• IEnumerable interface Returns an enumerator that iterates through the collection.
• IEnumerable<T> is the base interface for collections in the System.Collections.Generic namespace

We can implement IEnumerable Interface this way:

Conclusions

We use IEnumerable interface for one of the following reasons:

• To support the for-each statement.
• To interoperate with anything expecting a standard collection.
• To meet the requirements of a more sophisticated collection interface.
• To support collection initializers.

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If you want to get more information about all the methods and characteristics of them, follow this link:

IEnumerable Interface (System.Collections) | Microsoft Docs