I see two issues with your code. First, the way you're outputting the results, it's impossible to tell the groupings of the values since you're just outputing each one on its own line.
This could be resolved buy using Console.Write for each value in a group, and then adding a Console.WriteLine() when the group is done. This way the values from each group are displayed on a separate line. We also might want to pad the values so they line up nicely by getting the length of the largest value and passing that to the PadRight method:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var numItems = 18;
var splitBy = 3;
var input = Enumerable.Range(0, numItems).ToList();
var results = input.Split(splitBy);
// Get the length of the largest value to use for padding smaller values,
// so all the columns will line up when we display the results
var padValue = input.Max().ToString().Length + 1;
foreach (var group in results)
{
foreach (var item in group)
{
Console.Write($"{item}".PadRight(padValue));
}
Console.WriteLine();
}
Console.Write("\n\nDone. Press any key to exit...");
Console.ReadKey();
}
Now your results look pretty good, except we can see that the numbers are not grouped as we expect:
0 3 6 9 12 15
1 4 7 10 13 16
2 5 8 11 14 17
The reason for this is that we're grouping by the remainder of each item divided by the number of parts. So, the first group contains all numbers whose remainder after being divided by 3 is 0, the second is all items whose remainder is 1, etc.
To resolve this, we should instead divide the index of the item by the number of items in a row (the number of columns).
In other words, 18 items divided by 3 rows will result in 6 items per row. With integer division, all the indexes from 0 to 5 will have a remainder of 0 when divided by 6, all the indexes from 6 to 11 will have a remainder of 1 when divided by 6, and all the indexes from 12 to 17 will have a remainder of 2 when divided by 6.
However, we also have to be able to handle the overflow numbers. One way to do this is to check if the index is greater than or equal to rows * columns (i.e. it would end up on a new row instead of on the last row). If this is true, then we set it to the last row.
I'm not great at linq so there may be a better way to write this, but we can modify our extension method like so:
public static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> Split<T>(
this IEnumerable<T> list, int parts)
{
int numItems = list.Count();
int columns = numItems / parts;
int overflow = numItems % parts;
int index = 0;
return from item in list
group item by
index++ >= (parts * columns) ? parts - 1 : (index - 1) / columns
into part
select part.AsEnumerable();
}
And now our results look better:
// For 18 items split into 3
0 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17
// For 25 items split into 7
0 1 2
3 4 5
6 7 8
9 10 11
12 13 14
15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
