Assembly.GetTypes() returns strange type names e.g. “<>c”

Question

When using Assembly.GetTypes() I get types that have Type.Name that begin with <>c.....

I tried to google if this is an

Answer 1

They're compiler generated types, which would include anonymous types, but also the implementations of IEnumerable<T>, IEnumerator<T>, IEnumerable and IEnumerator that are produced by yield and the state-machine structures produced by await.

They will have the CompilerGeneratedAttribute.

You describe the names as "strange" and they are deliberately such. They are all names that are valid .NET names, but not valid in common .NET languages, particularly C# and VB.NET. This means you couldn't create such a class with C# coding directly, so there doesn't need to have any logic to check the programmer hasn't created a matching class.

Answer 2

These are compiler generated display classes. You can distinguish them by looking for the CompilerGeneratedAttribute:

var attr = Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(type, typeof(CompilerGeneratedAttribute));

Answer 3

These are the CompilerGeneratedAttribute Class

Distinguishes a compiler-generated element from a user-generated element. This class cannot be inherited.

You can check it like

using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;


bool CompilerGen(Type t)
{
    var attr = Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(t, typeof(CompilerGeneratedAttribute));
    return attr != null;
}