Possible to iterate backwards through a foreach?

Question

If you are on .NET 3.5 you can do this:

IEnumerable<int> enumerableThing = ...;
foreach (var x in enumerableThing.Reverse())

It isn't very efficient as it has to basically go through the enumerator forwards putting everything on a stack then pops everything back out in reverse order.

If you have a directly-indexable collection (e.g. IList) you should definitely use a for loop instead.

If you are on .NET 2.0 and cannot use a for loop (i.e. you just have an IEnumerable) then you will just have to write your own Reverse function. This should work:

static IEnumerable<T> Reverse<T>(IEnumerable<T> input)
{
    return new Stack<T>(input);
}

This relies on some behaviour which is perhaps not that obvious. When you pass in an IEnumerable to the stack constructor it will iterate through it and push the items onto the stack. When you then iterate through the stack it pops things back out in reverse order.

This and the .NET 3.5 Reverse() extension method will obviously blow up if you feed it an IEnumerable which never stops returning items.

When working with a list (direct indexing), you cannot do it as efficiently as using a for loop.

Edit: Which generally means, when you are able to use a for loop, it's likely the correct method for this task. Plus, for as much as foreach is implemented in-order, the construct itself is built for expressing loops that are independent of element indexes and iteration order, which is particularly important in parallel programming. It is my opinion that iteration relying on order should not use foreach for looping.

As 280Z28 says, for an IList<T> you can just use the index. You could hide this in an extension method:

public static IEnumerable<T> FastReverse<T>(this IList<T> items)
{
    for (int i = items.Count-1; i >= 0; i--)
    {
        yield return items[i];
    }
}

This will be faster than Enumerable.Reverse() which buffers all the data first. (I don't believe Reverse has any optimisations applied in the way that Count() does.) Note that this buffering means that the data is read completely when you first start iterating, whereas FastReverse will "see" any changes made to the list while you iterate. (It will also break if you remove multiple items between iterations.)

For general sequences, there's no way of iterating in reverse - the sequence could be infinite, for example:

public static IEnumerable<T> GetStringsOfIncreasingSize()
{
    string ret = "";
    while (true)
    {
        yield return ret;
        ret = ret + "x";
    }
}

What would you expect to happen if you tried to iterate over that in reverse?

Before using foreach for iteration, reverse the list by the reverse method:

    myList.Reverse();
    foreach( List listItem in myList)
    {
       Console.WriteLine(listItem);
    }