Partitioning Operators—Skipping and Taking Elements

Paging data involves restricting the amount of data returned to segments of the entire sequence. For instance, it is common for websites to return the results of a search in groups of a certain increment to improve performance by not transferring all one million items, just the first ten, then the next ten when asked, and so on. The Skip and Take operators form the basis for achieving this using LINQ queries. SkipWhile and TakeWhile allow conditional statements to control the segmentation of data, skipping data until a predicate fails or taking data until a predicate fails.

Skip and Take Operators

Skip and Take do as their names suggest; Skip jumps over the number of elements in a sequence (or skips the entire sequence if the count of elements is less than the number to skip), and Take returns the given number of elements (or as many elements as possible until the end of the sequence is reached).