Question

In C#, is there an inline shortcut to instantiate a List<T> with only one item?

I’m currently doing:

new List<string>( new string[] { "title" } )) 

Having this code everywhere reduces readability. I’ve thought of using a utility method like this:

public static List<T> SingleItemList<T>( T value ) {     return (new List<T>( new T[] { value } )); } 

So I could do:

SingleItemList("title"); 

Is there a shorter / cleaner way?

Answer 1

Simply use this:

List<string> list = new List<string>() { 'single value' }; 

You can even omit the () braces:

List<string> list = new List<string> { 'single value' }; 

Update: of course this also works for more than one entry:

List<string> list = new List<string> { 'value1', 'value2', ... };