Adding synchronous and asynchronous foreach support to Range in C#

In C# 8, we got Range and Index. This allows you to construct a sequence of values. This article will look at diferent ways of adding foreach support in C# to Range. Let's first look at enumeration in the synchronous case. This requires us to add an enumerator to Range as an extension method. We define the following extension method GetEnumerator on Range to achieve this: This requires us to create a custom enumerator class that has these methods :

• MoveNext
• Current

The rest of the custom enumerator is happening via the logic in these methods and the constructor of this custom enumerator.

public static class RangeExtensions
{
	public static CustomRangeEnumerator GetEnumerator(this Range range) => new CustomRangeEnumerator(range);

	public class CustomRangeEnumerator
	{

		private int _current;
		private readonly int _end;
		private readonly int _start;
		private readonly bool _isDescending;

		public CustomRangeEnumerator(Range range)
		{
			if (range.End.IsFromEnd)
			{
				throw new NotSupportedException();
			}
			_end = range.End.Value;
			_start = range.Start.Value;
			_isDescending = _start > _end;
			_current = _isDescending ? range.Start.Value + 1 : range.Start.Value - 1;
		}

		public int Current => _current;

		public bool MoveNext()
		{
			if (_isDescending)
			{
				_current--;
				return _current >= _end;
			}
			else
			{
				_current++;
				return _current <= _end;
			}
		}
	}
}

The following code tests out this range enumeration:

Console.WriteLine($"Iterating range 10..1");
	foreach (var num in (10..1))
	{
		Console.WriteLine(num);
	}

	Console.WriteLine($"Iterating range 20..30");
	foreach (var num in 20..30)
	{
		Console.WriteLine(num);
	}

And we get the following output, showing we can enumerate a range both increasing and decreasing :

10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1

Iterating range 20..30
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

Let's look next how we can implement async support for iterations. I first started with having a go with IAsyncEnumerator. But I could not make the cancellation token work, since I could not pass it in. Instead I landed on a method GetItemsAsync that supports cancellation tokens being passed in and will respect cancellation. Here is the extension methods I created :

public static class RangeExtensions
{

	public static async IAsyncEnumerable<int> GetItemsAsync(this Range range, CancellationToken cancellationToken = default)
	{
		await foreach (var num in range)
		{
			if (cancellationToken.IsCancellationRequested){
				Console.WriteLine($"Iteration FAILED: Exiting the IAsyncEnumerable iteration as soon as possible since cancellation was requested at index: {num}");
			}
			cancellationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();
			await Task.Delay(100);
			yield return num;
		}
	}
	
	// Existing asynchronous enumeration with delay and cancellation token
	public static CustomIntAsyncEnumerator GetAsyncEnumerator(this Range range)
		=> new CustomIntAsyncEnumerator(range);

	public class CustomIntAsyncEnumerator : IAsyncEnumerator<int>
	{
		private int _current;
		private readonly int _start;
		private readonly int _end;
		private readonly bool _isDescending;

		public CustomIntAsyncEnumerator(Range range)
		{
			_start = range.Start.Value;
			_end = range.End.Value;
			_isDescending = _start > _end;
			_current = _isDescending ? _start + 1 : _start - 1;
		}

		public int Current => _current;

		public async ValueTask<bool> MoveNextAsync()
		{
			// Wait for the specified delay time
			await Task.Delay(0);

			if (_isDescending)
			{
				if (_current > _end)
				{
					_current--;
					return true;
				}
			}
			else
			{
				if (_current < _end)
				{
					_current++;
					return true;
				}
			}

			return false;
		}

		public ValueTask DisposeAsync()
		{
			// Perform any necessary cleanup here
			return new ValueTask();
		}
	}
}

The code below tests the async enumeration. The benefit of the IAsyncEnumerator is that you can iterate without any hassles with cancellation token, but you should respect cancellation tokens. So the last method call calling the method GetItemsAsync do respect the cancellation token and also accepts such a token being passed in. I tested out the code in this article with Linqpad 7, and developed it using this small IDE.

    var rangeOneHundredDownTo90 = 100..90;

	Console.WriteLine($"Await foreach over variable {nameof(rangeOneHundredDownTo90)}");
	await foreach (var num in rangeOneHundredDownTo90)
	{
		Console.WriteLine(num);
	}

	Console.WriteLine("Async iteration from 140 to 180, waiting 500 ms between each iteration");

	var range = 140..180;

	var cts = new CancellationTokenSource();
	var token = cts.Token;

	await foreach (var num in range.GetItemsAsync(token))
	{
		if (num >= 170)
		{
			cts.Cancel();
		}
		Console.WriteLine(num);
	}

The screen shot below shows that the cancellation token was throwing a OperationCanceledException as was the intent of the demo code.