Enumerating all combinations of lists of different types

Posted by jball on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by jball
Published on 2010-04-20T21:01:09Z Indexed on 2010/04/20 21:03 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 277

Filed under:
|

Given two IEnumberables of different types, what is the best practice (considering readability and maintainability) for iterating over both lists to perform an action on all possible combinations?

My initial solution was to use nested foreach loops, iterating over the first IEnumerable, and then within that loop, iterating over the second IEnumerable and passing the value from the outer and the current loop into the target method. Eg.:

enum ParamOne
{
    First, 
    Second,
    Etc
}

List<int> paramTwo = new List<int>() { 1, 2, 3 };

void LoopExample()
{
    foreach (ParamOne alpha in Enum.GetValues(typeof(ParamOne)))
    {
        foreach (int beta in paramTwo)
        {
            DoSomething(alpha, beta);
        }
    }
 }

I tried to restructure it with LINQ, but ended up with something that had no obvious advantages and seemed less intuitive. A search here shows lots of questions about nesting foreachs to iterate over child properties, but I couldn't find anything about iterating over two distinct lists.

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about enumeration

Related posts about combinations