Generic enum Parser
There are many ways to parse an
enum . For example, we could use
switch in C# to parse
enum. But the problem will be if that
enum has 10 items in it (for example), then we need to write 10
case statements. So if we have 10
enums with 10 items, then we need to write 10x10
case statements plus all the
deafult statements.
I use the following technique to parse
enum. First of all, I use the following two
enums to describe this tip:
public enum EnumOne
{
None = 0,
One = 1,
Two = 2,
Three = 3
}
public enum EnumTwo
{
None,
One,
Two,
Three
}
So we could parse the above
enum using the following
switch code block,
public EnumOne ParseEnum(string item)
{
switch (item)
{
case "One":
return EnumOne.One;
case "Two":
return EnumOne.Two;
case "Three":
return EnumOne.Three;
}
return EnumOne.None;
}
But we want to parse
EnumOne and
EnumTwo. As a result, we need to write two blocks of
switch, whereas the following generic
enum parser will do the job using minimum lines of
code.
public TEnum ParseEnum<TEnum>(string item, bool ignorecase = default(bool))
where TEnum : struct
{
TEnum tenumResult = default(TEnum);
return Enum.TryParse<TEnum>(item, ignorecase, out tenumResult) ?
tenumResult : default(TEnum);
}
To test the above code, we could use the following code block:
public void Test()
{
Console.WriteLine("{0}, {1}, {2}, {3}, {4}",
new object[]
{
ParseEnum("One"),
ParseEnum<EnumOne>("Two"),
ParseEnum<EnumTwo>("TwoTwo"),
ParseEnum<EnumTwo>("1"),
ParseEnum<EnumTwo>(string.Empty)
});
}
In this tip, we assume that whatever
enum we are going to parse, it has a default value for example, in here
None is default for
EnumOne and
EnumTwo, otherwise parser will
return first item of the
enum.