The best way to get a count of IEnumerable

Question

Whats the best/easiest way to obtain a count of items within an IEnumerable collection without enumerating over all of the items in the collection?

Possible with LIN

Answer 1

An IEnumerable will have to iterate through every item. to get the full count. If you just need to check if there is one or more items in an IEnumerable a more efficient method is to check if there are any. Any() only check to see there is a value and does not loop through everything.

IEnumerable myStrings = new List(){"one","two", "three"};

bool hasValues = myStrings.Any();