Manually increment an enumerator inside foreach lo

Question

I have a nested while loop inside a foreach loop where I would like to advance the enumerator indefinitately while a certain condition is met. To do this I try casting the enumerator to IEnumerator< T > (which it must be if it is in a foreach loop) then calling MoveNext() on the casted object but it gives me an error saying I cannot convert it.

Cannot convert type 'System.DateTime' to System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerator via a reference conversion, boxing conversion, unboxing conversion, wrapping conversion, or null type conversion.

        foreach (DateTime time in times)
        {
            while (condition)
            {
                // perform action
                // move to next item
                (time as IEnumerator<DateTime>).MoveNext(); // will not let me do this
            }

            // code to execute after while condition is met
         }

What is the best way to manually increment the IEnumerator inside of the foreach loop?

EDIT: Edited to show there is code after the while loop that I would like executed once the condition is met which is why I wanted to manually increment inside the while then break out of it as opposed to continue which would put me back at the top. If this isn't possible I believe the best thing is to redesign how I am doing it.

Answer 1

This is just a guess, but it sounds like what you're trying to do is take a list of datetimes and move past all of them which meet a certain criteria, then perform an action on the rest of the list. If that's what you're trying to do, you probably want something like SkipWhile() from System.Linq. For example, the following code takes a series of datetimes and skips past all of them which are before the cutoff date; then it prints out the remaining datetimes:

var times = new List<DateTime>()
    {
        DateTime.Now.AddDays(1), DateTime.Now.AddDays(2), DateTime.Now.AddDays(3), DateTime.Now.AddDays(4)
    };

var cutoff = DateTime.Now.AddDays(2);

var timesAfterCutoff = times.SkipWhile(datetime => datetime.CompareTo(cutoff) < 1)
    .Select(datetime => datetime);

foreach (var dateTime in timesAfterCutoff)
{
    Console.WriteLine(dateTime);
}

Console.ReadLine();

Is that the sort of thing you're trying to do?

Answer 2

You could use a func as your iterator and keep the state that you are changing in that delegate to be evaluated each iteration.

public static IEnumerable<T> FunkyIEnumerable<T>(this Func<Tuple<bool, T>> nextOrNot)
    {
        while(true)
        {
           var result = nextOrNot();

            if(result.Item1)
                yield return result.Item2;

            else
                break;

        }

        yield break;

    }

    Func<Tuple<bool, int>> nextNumber = () => 
            Tuple.Create(SomeRemoteService.CanIContinueToSendNumbers(), 1);

    foreach(var justGonnaBeOne in nextNumber.FunkyIEnumerable())
            Console.Writeline(justGonnaBeOne.ToString());