How to get an empty list of a collection?

I have a colle开发者_开发知识库ction of anonymous class and I want to return an empty list of it.

What is the best readable expression to use?

I though of the following but I don't think they are readably enough:

var result = MyCollection.Take(0).ToList();

var result = MyCollection.Where(p => false).ToList();

Note: I don't want to empty the collection itself.

Any suggestion!

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Whats about:

Enumerable.Empty<T>();

This returns an empty enumerable which is of type T. If you really want a List so you are free to do this:

Enumerable.Empty<T>().ToList<T>();

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Actually, if you use a generic extension you don't even have to use any Linq to achieve this, you already have the anonymous type exposed through T

public static IList<T> GetEmptyList<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source)
{
    return new List<T>();
}

var emp = MyCollection.GetEmptyList();

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Given that your first suggestion works and should perform well - if readability is the only issue, why not create an extension method:

public static IList<T> CreateEmptyCopy(this IEnumerable<T> source)
{
   return source.Take(0).ToList();
}

Now you can refactor your example to

var result = MyCollection.CreateEmptyCopy();

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For performance reasons, you should stick with the first option you came up with.

The other one would iterate over the entire collection before returning an empty list.

Because the anonymous type there is no way, in source code, to create a list. There is, however, a way to create such list through reflection.