How to take all but the last element in a sequence using LINQ?

Question

Let\'s say I have a sequence.

IEnumerable sequence = GetSequenceFromExpensiveSource();
// sequence now contains: 0,1,2,3,...,999999,1000000


        

Answer 1

A simple way would be to just convert to a queue and dequeue until only the number of items you want to skip is left.

public static IEnumerable<T> SkipLast<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, int n)
{
    var queue = new Queue<T>(source);

    while (queue.Count() > n)
    {
        yield return queue.Dequeue();
    }
}

Answer 2

if you don't have time to roll out your own extension, here's a quicker way:

var next = sequence.First();
sequence.Skip(1)
    .Select(s => 
    { 
        var selected = next;
        next = s;
        return selected;
    });

Answer 3

A slight variation on the accepted answer, which (for my tastes) is a bit simpler:

    public static IEnumerable<T> AllButLast<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, int n = 1)
    {
        // for efficiency, handle degenerate n == 0 case separately 
        if (n == 0)
        {
            foreach (var item in enumerable)
                yield return item;
            yield break;
        }

        var queue = new Queue<T>(n);
        foreach (var item in enumerable)
        {
            if (queue.Count == n)
                yield return queue.Dequeue();

            queue.Enqueue(item);
        }
    }

Answer 4

Could be:

var allBuLast = sequence.TakeWhile(e => e != sequence.Last());

I guess it should be like de "Where" but preserving the order(?).

Answer 5

    public static IEnumerable<T> NoLast<T> (this IEnumerable<T> items) {
        if (items != null) {
            var e = items.GetEnumerator();
            if (e.MoveNext ()) {
                T head = e.Current;
                while (e.MoveNext ()) {
                    yield return head; ;
                    head = e.Current;
                }
            }
        }
    }

Answer 6

I would probably do something like this:

sequence.Where(x => x != sequence.LastOrDefault())

This is one iteration with a check that it isn't the last one for each time though.