How to assign string values to enums and use that value in a switch

Question

Basically a series of titles will be passed into the switch statement and I need to compare them against the string values of the enum. But I have little to no idea how to do th

Answer 1

Have a read of this tutorial to understand how enums work. There are examples of switch statements too.

Answer 2

Enumerations cannot be of string type.

The approved types for an enum are byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, or ulong.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sbbt4032.aspx

Answer 3

Just sharing my solution. By downloading the nuget package Extension.MV, a method is available for getting the string from a Enum Description

public enum Prefix
{
    [Description("doctor")]
    doctor = 1,
    [Description("mr")]
    mr = 2,
    [Description("mrs")]
    mrs = 3
}

public static class PrefixAdapter {

    public static string ToText(this Prefix prefix) {
        return prefix.GetEnumDescription();
    }

    public static Prefix ToPrefix(this string text) {
        switch (text)
        {
            case "doctor"
                return Prefix.doctor;
            case "mr"
                return Prefix.mr;
            case "ms"
                return Prefix.mrs;
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

You can't have an enum with an underlying type of string. The underlying type can be any integral type except char.

If you want to translate a string to your enum then you'll probably need to use the Parse or TryParse methods.

string incoming = "doctor";

// throws an exception if the string can't be parsed as a TestEnum
TestEnum foo = (TestEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(TestEnum), incoming, true);

// try to parse the string as a TestEnum without throwing an exception
TestEnum bar;
if (Enum.TryParse(incoming, true, out bar))
{
    // success
}
else
{
    // the string isn't an element of TestEnum
}

// ...

enum TestEnum
{
    Doctor, Mr, Mrs
}

Answer 5

Why not to use just pure enum and switches?

enum Prefix
{
    doctor,
    mr,
    mrs
}

Then you can use is like

string case = "doctor";

switch ((Prefix)Enum.Parse(typeof(Prefix), "doctor"))
{
    case Prefix.doctor:
        ...
        break;
    ...
    default:
        break;
}

Answer 6

I believe the standard way to do this is to use a static class with readonly string properties that return the value you want.