Prepend method in LINQ

29 Jun 2010 1 mins .NET, C#, LINQ

Yesterday I needed to put one element at beginning of the collection I already had. Some kind of Concat upside down. 😃 As you can use the Concat method, it looks weird when you see the code, because two items are actually swapped. So I created a simple extension method to do it for me.

I started with:

public static IEnumerable<T> Prepend<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, T item)
{
	yield return item;
	foreach (var x in source)
		yield return x;
}

It’s classic imperative approach, you’re expressing how you’ll do it. Then I thought: “Hey, why not to use LINQ methods already available.". As you guess, I abused Concat method as I wrote above:

public static IEnumerable<T> Prepend<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, T item)
{
	return new[] { item }.Concat(source);
}

You can easily extend both methods to accept also collection as a second parameter.

If you’re more about declarative programming you’ll probably like the other one. But choose whatever fits your brain better.

Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.