What is the difference between IEnumerator and IEnumerable?

Question

What are the differences between IEnumerator and IEnumerable?

Answer 1

http://forums.asp.net/t/1310865.aspx

Answer 2

IEnumerable is an interface that defines one method GetEnumerator which returns an IEnumerator interface, this in turn allows readonly access to a collection. A collection that implements IEnumerable can be used with a foreach statement.

Definition

IEnumerable 

public IEnumerator GetEnumerator();

IEnumerator

public object Current;
public void Reset();
public bool MoveNext();

example code from codebetter.com

Answer 3

An IEnumerator is a thing that can enumerate: it has the MoveNext, Current, and Reset methods (which in .NET code you probably won't call explicitly, though you could).

An IEnumerable is a thing that can be enumerated...which simply means that it has a GetEnumerator method that returns an IEnumerator.

Which do you use? The only reason to use IEnumerator is if you have something that has a nonstandard way of enumerating (that is, of returning its various elements one-by-one), and you need to define how that works. You'd create a new class implementing IEnumerator. But you'd still need to return that IEnumerator in an IEnumerable class.

For a look at what an enumerator (implementing IEnumerator<T>) looks like, see any Enumerator<T> class, such as the ones contained in List<T>, Queue<T>, or Stack<T>. For a look at a class implementing IEnumerable, see any standard collection class.

Answer 4

An Enumerator shows you the items in a list or collection. Each instance of an Enumerator is a a certain position (the 1st element, the 7th element, etc) and can give you that element (IEnumerator.Current) or move to the next one (IEnumerator.MoveNext). When you write a foreach loop in C#, the compiler generates code that uses an Enumerator.

An Enumerable is a class that can give you Enumerators. It has a method called GetEnumerator which gives you an Enumerator that looks at its items. When you write a foreach loop in C#, the code that it generates calls GetEnumerator to create the Enumerator used by the loop.