Improved UpTo Extension Method

Back in May of '09, I wrote a post about an extension method to mimic Ruby's upto.

Today, I was hanging out at Visual Studio Live and had another idea. In Ruby, the upto method takes an end value and executes a code block. In C#, interpreted this as an extension method that takes an end value and an action. They syntax ends up being pretty similar and it works fine.

Lately, I've been using an Each extension method for IEnumerables. I know an Each extension method seems like a waste, but I like the fluency of it for basic actions. So, given that I have the Each method on IEnumerable<T> anyway, I decided UpTo should really return an IEnumerable as well.

Here's my new UpTo extension method:

public static IEnumerable<int> UpTo(this int start, int end)
{
    while (start <= end)
        yield return start++;
}

Now, instead of passing your action to the UpTo method like Ruby's upto, you get your enumerable and pass your delegate to your Each extension method. Here's what it looks like:

static void Main()
{
    //for (int i = 5; i <= 10; i++)
    //{
    //    Console.WriteLine(i);
    //}

    5.UpTo(10).Each(Console.WriteLine);
    
    Console.ReadLine();

    // output
    // 5
    // 6
    // 7
    // 8
    // 9
    // 10
}

If you're using .Net 3.5 or newer, Linq shipped with an Enumerator class which has a Range static method so your code could look more like this:

public static class NumericExtensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<int> UpTo(this int start, int end)
    {
        return Enumerable.Range(start, end - start + 1);
    }
}

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        //foreach (var i in Enumerable.Range(5, 6))
        //{
        //    Console.WriteLine(i);
        //}

        5.UpTo(10).Each(Console.WriteLine);
        
        Console.ReadLine();

        // output
        // 5
        // 6
        // 7
        // 8
        // 9
        // 10
    }
}

Another reason to make UpTo return an IEnumerable instead of making it a void action executer is because sometimes you don't really want to pass a large anonymous method to the Each method. You can use the same UpTo method like this:

static void Main()
{
    //foreach (var i in Enumerable.Range(5, 6))
    //{
    //    // Do a lot of stuff!!
    //}

    //5.UpTo(10).Each(i =>
    //    {
    //        // Do a lot of stuff!!
    //    });

    foreach (var i in 5.UpTo(10))
    {
        // Do a lot of stuff!!
    }
}