One line conversion of string to List<string> in C#

Question

This is a rather simple, but annoying problem I am facing.

There are many places in my application that can use either one or many strings... so to say. I have used a List of string by default.

But every time I have a single string, I am doing this:

List<string> myList = new List<string>();
myList.Add(myString);

A simple myString.ToList() does not work since it converts into a list of characters and not a list with one string. Is there an efficient one line way to do this?

Answer 1

Using collection initializer:

List<string> myList = new List<string>{myString};

Update. Or, as suggested in comments,

var myList = new List<string>{myString};

Answer 2

I don't at all think that it's worth doing the following, BUT if you really are often creating string lists from single strings, and you really really want the shortest syntax possible - then you could write an extension method:

public static class StringExt
{
    public static List<string> AsList(this string self)
    {
        return new List<string> { self };
    }
}

Then you would just do:

var list = myString.AsList();

But like I said, it seems hardly worth it. It also may be confusable with:

var list = myString.ToList();

which (by using Linq) will create a list of chars from the chars in the string.