Converting from IEnumerable to List
In case you're working with a regular old System.Collections.IEnumerable
instead of IEnumerable<T>
you can use enumerable.Cast<object>().ToList()
If you're using an implementation of System.Collections.IEnumerable
you can do like following to convert it to a List
. The following uses Enumerable.Cast method to convert IEnumberable
to a Generic List
.
//ArrayList Implements IEnumerable interface
ArrayList _provinces = new System.Collections.ArrayList();
_provinces.Add("Western");
_provinces.Add("Eastern");
List<string> provinces = _provinces.Cast<string>().ToList();
If you're using Generic version IEnumerable<T>
, The conversion is straight forward. Since both are generics, you can do like below,
IEnumerable<int> values = Enumerable.Range(1, 10);
List<int> valueList = values.ToList();
But if the IEnumerable
is null, when you try to convert it to a List
, you'll get
ArgumentNullException
saying Value cannot be null.
IEnumerable<int> values2 = null;
List<int> valueList2 = values2.ToList();
Therefore as mentioned in the other answer, remember to do a null
check before converting it to a List
.
You can do this very simply using LINQ.
Make sure this using is at the top of your C# file:
using System.Linq;
Then use the ToList
extension method.
Example:
IEnumerable<int> enumerable = Enumerable.Range(1, 300);
List<int> asList = enumerable.ToList();