Question

I have a nested while loop inside a foreach loop where I would like to advance the enumerator indefinitately while a certain condition is met. To do this I try casting the enumerator to IEnumerator< T > (which it must be if it is in a foreach loop) then calling MoveNext() on the casted object but it gives me an error saying I cannot convert it.

Cannot convert type ‘System.DateTime’ to System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerator via a reference conversion, boxing conversion, unboxing conversion, wrapping conversion, or null type conversion.

        foreach (DateTime time in times)
        {
            while (condition)
            {
                // perform action
                // move to next item
                (time as IEnumerator<DateTime>).MoveNext(); // will not let me do this
            }

            // code to execute after while condition is met
         }

What is the best way to manually increment the IEnumerator inside of the foreach loop?

EDIT:
Edited to show there is code after the while loop that I would like executed once the condition is met which is why I wanted to manually increment inside the while then break out of it as opposed to continue which would put me back at the top. If this isn’t possible I believe the best thing is to redesign how I am doing it.

Answer 1

Many of the other answers recommend using continue, which may very well help you do what you need to do. However, in the interests of showing manually moving the enumerator, first you must have the enumerator, and that means writing your loop as a while.

using (var enumerator = times.GetEnumerator())
{
    DateTime time;
    while (enumerator.MoveNext()) 
    {
        time = enumerator.Current;
        // pre-condition code
        while (condition)
        {
            if (enumerator.MoveNext())
            {
                time = enumerator.Current;
                // condition code
            }
            else 
            {
                condition = false;
            }
        }
        // post-condition code
    }
}

From your comments:

How can the foreach loop advance it if it doesn’t implement the IEnumerator interface?

In your loop, time is a DateTime. It is not the object that needs to implement an interface or pattern to work in the loop. times is a sequence of DateTime values, it is the one that must implement the enumerable pattern. This is generally fulfilled by implementing the IEnumerable<T> and IEnumerable interfaces, which simply require T GetEnumerator() and object GetEnumerator() methods. The methods return an object implementing IEnumerator<T> and IEnumerator, which define a bool MoveNext() method and a T or object Current property. But time cannot be cast to IEnumerator, because it is no such thing, and neither is the times sequence.