IEnumerable ForEach extension method

Writing

List<T> has a method called ForEach that takes an Action<T> delegate, and I wanted one for IEnumerable. I also had someone ask about it in my previous post. It wasn’t hard to write, but I figured I would throw it up here for future reference and also in case anyone needed help getting theirs working. If anyone notices anything I did that was dumb you can give me feedback as well. I believe I actually implemented something similar to this a while back, but anyways… without further ado…

public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, Action<T> action)
{
    if (enumerable == null)
        throw new ArgumentNullException("enumerable");
 
    if (action == null)
        throw new ArgumentNullException("action");
 
    foreach (T item in enumerable)
    {
        action(item);
    }
}

Hope it helps.

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Comments (8)

  1. Justin, pretty much what I had in my version. You might add the following which comes from the code on a List<> ForEach:

    if (func == null)
    throw new ArgumentNullException("func");

    -Andy

  2. Nice. I assumed that method was an extension method like the rest – nope, I was just using List<T>.

    You should throw an ArgumentNullException for each parameter when appropriate. Also, naming your action "func" is confusing because Action and Func serve mutually exclusive purposes.

  3. I would not make it a void method, but an IEnumerable<T> method, like other linq queries.

  4. I don’t follow. If the ForEach method just returned IEnumerable<T>, then you would still have to iterate over it to do an action. I could do a Map method, like I did in this post … http://www.codethinked.com/post/2007/11/Lambdas-and-Closures-and-Currying-Oh-my!-(Part-4).aspx Look at the one toward the end of that post, but that is a bit of a different operation from what I am trying to achieve here. The Map statement is essentially the same as the LINQ Select extension method.

  5. Kevin Pilch Bisson of Microsoft (http://blogs.msdn.com/kevinpilchbisson/) and I discussed this on ##csharp on freenode.net earlier, and came up with the following set of methods:

    public static IEnumerable<T> Apply<T> (this IEnumerable<T> self, Action<T> action)
    {
    foreach (T t in self) {
    action (t);
    yield return t;
    }
    }

    public static void Apply<T> (this IEnumerable<T> self)
    {
    #pragma warning disable 219
    foreach (T t in self) {
    // ignore t
    }
    #pragma warning restore 219
    }

    The idea is that Apply<T>(IEnumerable<T>, Action<T>) can be chained, as it returns an IEnumerable<T>, but Apply<T>(IEnumerable<T>) causes an immediate application of the list, thus forcing computation and invoking all delegates.

    I’ll be working on getting this into Mono.Rocks (http://www.mono-project.com/Rocks).

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