Question

Is there a more elegant way to implement going 5 items at a time than a for loop like this?

var q = Campaign_stats.OrderByDescending(c=>c.Leads).Select(c=>c.PID).Take(23);
var count = q.Count();
for (int i = 0; i < (count/5)+1; i++)
{
   q.Skip(i*5).Take(5).Dump();
}

Answer 1

So you want to efficiently call Dump() on every 5 items in q.

The solution you have now will re-iterate the IEnumerable<T> every time through the for loop. It may be more efficient to do something like this: (I don’t know what your type is so I’m using T)

const int N = 5;
T[] ar = new T[N];               // Temporary array of N items.
int i=0;
foreach(var item in q) {         // Just one iterator.
    ar[i++] = item;              // Store a reference to this item.
    if (i == N) {                // When we have N items,
        ar.Dump();               // dump them,
        i = 0;                   // and reset the array index.
    }
}

// Dump the remaining items
if (i > 0) {
    ar.Take(i).Dump();
}

This only uses one iterator. Considering your variable is named q, I’m assuming that is short for “query”, which implies this is against a database. So using just one iterator may be very beneficial.

---

I may keep this code, and wrap it up in an extension method. How about “clump”?

public static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> Clump<T>(this IEnumerable<T> items, int clumpSize) { 
    T[] ar = new T[clumpSize];
    int i=0;
    foreach(var item in items) {
        ar[i++] = item;
        if (i == clumpSize) {
            yield return ar;
            i = 0;
        }
    }
    if (i > 0)
        yield return ar.Take(i);
}

Calling it in the context of your code:

foreach (var clump in q.Clump(5)) {
    clump.Dump();
}