Is it possible to implement a recursive “SelectMany”?

Question

As we all know, Enumerable.SelectMany flattens a sequence of sequences into a single sequence. What if we wanted a method that could flatten sequences of sequen

Answer 1

This is trivial in F# with recursive sequence expressions.

let rec flatten (items: IEnumerable) =
  seq {
    for x in items do
      match x with
      | :? 'T as v -> yield v
      | :? IEnumerable as e -> yield! flatten e
      | _ -> failwithf "Expected IEnumerable or %A" typeof<'T>
  }

A test:

// forces 'T list to obj list
let (!) (l: obj list) = l
let y = ![["1";"2"];"3";[!["4";["5"];["6"]];["7"]];"8"]
let z : string list = flatten y |> Seq.toList
// val z : string list = ["1"; "2"; "3"; "4"; "5"; "6"; "7"; "8"]

Answer 2

As far as I understood your idea, this is my variant:

static IEnumerable<T> Flatten<T>(IEnumerable collection)
{
    foreach (var o in collection)
    {
        if (o is IEnumerable && !(o is T))
        {
            foreach (T t in Flatten<T>((IEnumerable)o))
                yield return t;
        }
        else
            yield return (T)o;
    }
}

and check it

List<object> s = new List<object>
    {
        "1",
        new string[] {"2","3"},
        "4",
        new object[] {new string[] {"5","6"},new string[] {"7","8"},},
    };
var fs = Flatten<string>(s);
foreach (string str in fs)
    Console.WriteLine(str);
Console.ReadLine();

Obviously, it does lack some type validity checks (an InvalidCastExcpetion if collection contains not T, and probably some other drawbacks)...well, at least it's lazy-evaluated, as desired.

!(o is T) was added to prevent flattenning of string to char array