Elegant way to combine multiple collections of elements?

c# linq generics collections
Donut picture Donut · Dec 20, 2010 · Viewed 93.4k times · Source

Say I have an arbitrary number of collections, each containing objects of the same type (for example, List<int> foo and List<int> bar). If these collections were themselves in a collection (e.g., of type List<List<int>>, I could use SelectMany to combine them all into one collection.

However, if these collections are not already in the same collection, it's my impression that I'd have to write a method like this:

public static IEnumerable<T> Combine<T>(params ICollection<T>[] toCombine)
{
   return toCombine.SelectMany(x => x);
}

Which I'd then call like this:

var combined = Combine(foo, bar);

Is there a clean, elegant way to combine (any number of) collections without having to write a utility method like Combine above? It seems simple enough that there should be a way to do it in LINQ, but perhaps not.

Answer

Domenic picture Domenic · Dec 20, 2010

I think you might be looking for LINQ's .Concat()?

var combined = foo.Concat(bar).Concat(foobar).Concat(...);

Alternatively, .Union() will remove duplicate elements.

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