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Iterating through an object which contains a list

I have an object of type object which I know contains a list (both because of the nature of the problem and because I can see it in the debugger). I want to be able to iterate through the members of the list.

My problen is that I can't work how to cast the object onto an interface that would allow iteration. I have tried:

List<object> objList = (List<object>)objectContainingList;
System.Array variantArray = (Array)objectContainingList;

//Simplified example of the problem:
 
//Generate a list containing integers
List<int> intList = new 
intList.Add(1);
intList.Add(5);
intList.Add(7);
 
//Loose all info about the object, remember this is a hypothetical example!
object objectContainingList = intList;
 
//Now I want to loop through the object
foreach (object obj in objectContainingList)
{
   Console.WriteLine(obj.ToString();
}

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abel

You need to do the following for this to work (you changed the List object to a type of object, not the items in that list):

List<int> castedList = (List<int>) objectContainingList;
foreach (int myInt in castedList )
{
   Console.WriteLine(myInt .ToString();
}

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erik_bradshaw

ASKER

The problem is a bit more complex than my simple example. I don't know either the type of object contained in the parent object nor the type of enumerable object, hence objectContainingList could be things like:

System.Array
System.Data.Linq.Table
Any member of System.Collections

All I know for certain is that the parent object (List<int> in the example above) supports the IEnumerable interface

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

abel

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abel

The above will print 10 and 12 to the debug output window. Note that the following would NOT work:

IEnumerable<object> castedEnum= (IEnumerable<object>) oUnknownEnumerableType;

because there's no explicit conversion to cast everything inside the list to another type, even though you request the "cath-all" type of object.

erik_bradshaw

ASKER

Worked great, thanks for all your help. It's so easy, can't believe I spent so much time battling with reflection to try and sort it out!