如何转换为IList类型？

Question

I want to achieve the effects of putting in random numbers in an IList and it seems I am unable to think of how to get the type of the IList , whether an int or decimal , etc. I cannot simply cast the Console.ReadLine() to the type of the IList .

public void RandomizeIList<T>(IList<T> list)
{
    randomNum = new Random();
    T typeRead = 0, typeReadSeed = 0;
    String strRead = "", strReadSeed = "";
    Console.WriteLine("How many {0}s do you want to randomly generate?", list.GetType());
    T strRead = (list.GetType())Console.ReadLine();
    Console.WriteLine("What's the limit of the randomly generated {0}s?", list.GetType());
    Int32.TryParse(strReadSeed, out intReadSeed);
    for (int i = 0; i < strRead; i++)
    {
        list[i] = randomNum.Next(intReadSeed);
    }
}

Answer 1

Syntactically what you want is:

T strRead = (T)Console.ReadLine();

However, Console.ReadLine only returns a string, so this cast (and the use of generics) makes no sense. Either you should be using a IList<string> (because you think T is a string) or you should be using IList<int> (because you are adding int s to the list). In any case, it's very unclear what you are trying to accomplish, since you are doing nothing with strRead .

Update, per comment :

Certainly, you can convert a string to an arbitrary type. The framework provides some utilities for this, such as the Convert class:

T strRead = (T)(object)Convert.ChangeType(Console.ReadLine(), typeof(T));

This will work for simple types -- you can use Convert to convert a string to an int , for example. However, it should go without saying that you can't use this class to convert any arbitrary string to any arbitrary type. For that, you will have to consider your own type conversion framework, perhaps combining the behaviors of Convert , with implicit and explicit conversions, etc. This is because it's clear that the string representation of a particular type is entirely dependent on the characteristics of that type.