A Generic enum Parser in C#





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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
.