C# Getting Enum values

.net, c#, enums, string

Solution

You can't assign an enum value to a string to start with. You'd have to call `ToString()`, which would convert `Country.UnitedKingdom` to "UnitedKingdom".

Two options suggest themselves:

- Create a `Dictionary<Country, string>`

- A switch statement

- Decorate each value with an attribute, and load that with reflection

Comments about each of them...

Sample code for `Dictionary<Country,string>`

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

enum Country
{
    UnitedKingdom, 
    UnitedStates,
    France,
    Portugal
}

class Test
{
    static readonly Dictionary<Country, string> CountryNames =
        new Dictionary<Country, string>
    {
        { Country.UnitedKingdom, "UK" },
        { Country.UnitedStates, "US" },
    };

    static string ConvertCountry(Country country) 
    {
        string name;
        return (CountryNames.TryGetValue(country, out name))
            ? name : country.ToString();
    }

    static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(ConvertCountry(Country.UnitedKingdom));
        Console.WriteLine(ConvertCountry(Country.UnitedStates));
        Console.WriteLine(ConvertCountry(Country.France));
    }
}

You might want to put the logic of `ConvertCountry` into an extension method. For example:

// Put this in a non-nested static class
public static string ToBriefName(this Country country) 
{
    string name;
    return (CountryNames.TryGetValue(country, out name))
        ? name : country.ToString();
}

Then you could write:

string x = Country.UnitedKingdom.ToBriefName();

As mentioned in the comments, the default dictionary comparer will involve boxing, which is non-ideal. For a one-off, I'd live with that until I found it was a bottleneck. If I were doing this for multiple enums, I'd write a reusable class.

Switch statement

I agree with yshuditelu's answer suggesting using a `switch` statement for relatively few cases. However, as each case is going to be a single statement, I'd personally change my coding style for this situation, to keep the code compact but readable:

public static string ToBriefName(this Country country) 
{
    switch (country)
    {
        case Country.UnitedKingdom:  return "UK";
        case Country.UnitedStates:   return "US";
        default:                     return country.ToString();
    }
}

You can add more cases to this without it getting too huge, and it's easy to cast your eyes across from enum value to the return value.

`DescriptionAttribute`

The point Rado made about the code for `DescriptionAttribute` being reusable is a good one, but in that case I'd recommend against using reflection every time you need to get a value. I'd probably write a generic static class to hold a lookup table (probably a `Dictionary`, possibly with a custom comparer as mentioned in the comments). Extension methods can't be defined in generic classes, so you'd probably end up with something like:

public static class EnumExtensions
{
    public static string ToDescription<T>(this T value) where T : struct
    {
        return DescriptionLookup<T>.GetDescription(value);
    }

    private static class DescriptionLookup<T> where T : struct
    {
        static readonly Dictionary<T, string> Descriptions;

        static DescriptionLookup()
        {
            // Initialize Descriptions here, and probably check
            // that T is an enum
        }

        internal static string GetDescription(T value)
        {
            string description;
            return Descriptions.TryGetValue(value, out description)
                ? description : value.ToString();
        }
    }
}

Problem

Original source

Related problems

• Can my enums have friendly names?