Does LINQ work with IEnumerable?

.net linq ienumerable
Bogdan Verbenets picture Bogdan Verbenets · Oct 13, 2011 · Viewed 50.6k times · Source

I have a class that implements IEnumerable, but doesn't implement IEnumerable<T>. I can't change this class, and I can't use another class instead of it. As I've understood from MSDN LINQ can be used if class implements IEnumerable<T>. I've tried using instance.ToQueryable(), but it still doesn't enable LINQ methods. I know for sure that this class can contain instances of only one type, so the class could implement IEnumerable<T>, but it just doesn't. So what can I do to query this class using LINQ expressions?

Answer

DeCaf picture DeCaf · Oct 13, 2011

You can use Cast<T>() or OfType<T> to get a generic version of an IEnumerable that fully supports LINQ.

Eg.

IEnumerable objects = ...;
IEnumerable<string> strings = objects.Cast<string>();

Or if you don't know what type it contains you can always do:

IEnumerable<object> e = objects.Cast<object>();

If your non-generic IEnumerable contains objects of various types and you are only interested in eg. the strings you can do:

IEnumerable<string> strings = objects.OfType<string>();

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