How can i get enum to contain a dash (-)?

Question

I\'m generating business objects from this schema using Enterprise Architect.

The schema has the following enumeration specification:

Answer 1

Short answer: No.

The reason being is that the - character is used as a token by the lexer for other purposes such as representing the binary and unary minus operator.

Your best bet is to either remove the - or replace it with some other character that is a valid character in identifier names. The only non-letter character you can generally use is _.

You can find more information in the C# Specification.

Answer 2

A C# identifier must start with an underscore, a character in the Unicode class Lu, Ll, Lt, Lm, Lo, or Nl, or an escape for one of those. All other characters must be from Unicode class Lu, Ll, Lt, Lm, Lo, Nl, Mn, Mc, Nd, Pc or Cf, or an escape for one of those.

Hyphen-minus is of category Pd.

If C# did allow it, you still couldn't use it on a public identifier if you needed to be CLS compliant, as it wouldn't fit its rules either.

This is just as well, as how are you meant to distinguish CD-ROM meaning a particular item in the enum from CD-ROM meaning to apply the - operator with CD as the left hand operand and ROM as the right hand operand?

If that list of possibilities is hard-coded, I'd just remove the hyphen-minus and have CDROM as the label. If it's not hard-coded I'd use a dictionary, as it's resiliant in the face of even more cases where something can't be an identifier.

Answer 3

You can't. Full stop. However, there are workarounds. You can, e.g., use DescriptionAttribute:

public enum PackageMedium : int {
    NTP,
    DAT,
    Exabyte,
    [Description("CD-ROM")]
    CDROM,
    DLT,
    D1,
    DVD,
    BD,
    LTO,
    LTO2,
    LTO4
}

This means, unfortunately, that you have more work to do when mapping values. On the other hand, it at lest compiles.

If you don't like that, pick another workaround, e.g., a dictionary:

var dict = Enum.GetValues(typeof(PackageMedium))
               .Cast<PackageMedium>()
               .Select(v => Tuple.Create(v == PackageMedium.CDROM ? "CD-ROM" : v.ToString(), v))
               .ToDictionary(t => t.Item1, t => t.Item2);

var myEnumVal = dict["CD-ROM"];