What is Func, how and when is it used

Question

What is Func<> and what is it used for?

Answer 1

Func<T> is a predefined delegate type for a method that returns some value of the type T.

In other words, you can use this type to reference a method that returns some value of T. E.g.

public static string GetMessage() { return "Hello world"; }

may be referenced like this

Func<string> f = GetMessage;

Answer 2

Think of it as a placeholder. It can be quite useful when you have code that follows a certain pattern but need not be tied to any particular functionality.

For example, consider the Enumerable.Select extension method.

• The pattern is: for every item in a sequence, select some value from that item (e.g., a property) and create a new sequence consisting of these values.
• The placeholder is: some selector function that actually gets the values for the sequence described above.

This method takes a Func<T, TResult> instead of any concrete function. This allows it to be used in any context where the above pattern applies.

So for example, say I have a List<Person> and I want just the name of every person in the list. I can do this:

var names = people.Select(p => p.Name);

Or say I want the age of every person:

var ages = people.Select(p => p.Age);

Right away, you can see how I was able to leverage the same code representing a pattern (with Select) with two different functions (p => p.Name and p => p.Age).

The alternative would be to write a different version of Select every time you wanted to scan a sequence for a different kind of value. So to achieve the same effect as above, I would need:

// Presumably, the code inside these two methods would look almost identical;
// the only difference would be the part that actually selects a value
// based on a Person.
var names = GetPersonNames(people);
var ages = GetPersonAges(people);

With a delegate acting as placeholder, I free myself from having to write out the same pattern over and over in cases like this.