C# provides a special foreach-loop statement that allows you to easily traverse all elements in an array to access all stored values.
foreach-loop which is extended for-loop is new for the C/C++/C# family of languages but is well known for the VB and PHP programmers.IEnumerable).Here is how a foreach loop looks like:
foreach (type variable in collection)
{
statements;
}
As you can see, it is significantly simpler than the standard for-loop and therefore is very often preferred by developers because it saves writing when you need to go through all the elements of a given collection.
Let's consider a very simple example of using the for loop.
string[] websites = new string[5] { "Google", "YouTube", "Facebook", "Baidu", "Yahoo!" };
foreach (string site in websites)
{
Console.WriteLine(site);
}
In the above example, an array of website names (strings) is created and iterate over elements, and print them on the console.
Let's run the above code and it will print the following output on the console window.
Google
YouTube
Facebook
Baidu
Yahoo!
Here is another example that is a little bit more complicated. A foreach statement can also be used to traverse all the elements of a C# Dictionary that contains key-value pairs.
The data types of the key and value must be specified as a comma-separated pair within <> (angled brackets) in the declaration.
Dictionary<int, string> numberNames = new Dictionary<int, string>();
numberNames.Add(1, "One");
numberNames.Add(2, "Two");
numberNames.Add(3, "Three");
foreach (KeyValuePair<int, string> item in numberNames)
{
Console.WriteLine("Key: {0}, Value: {1}", item.Key, item.Value);
}
Let's run the above example and you will see the iterator display the dictionary's key-value pair.
Key: 1, Value: One
Key: 2, Value: Two
Key: 3, Value: Three
All the examples related to the foreach loop are available in the ForeachLoop.cs file of the source code. Download the source code and try out all the examples for better understanding.