Blog Archive

Friday, November 3

Enum TryParse

I was somewhat surprised to discover that there's no TryParse method for the Enum class in the .NET Framework 2.0. (It's also odd that the docs/compiler keep referring to Enum as a class—and yet the apprpriate where constraint to apply is struct.) So here's a pair of generic methods to support TryParse for Enums:

public static class EnumUtility
{
   public static bool TryParse<T>(string value, out T result)
      where T : struct // error CS0702: Constraint cannot be special class 'System.Enum'
   {
      return TryParse<T>(value, out result, false);
   }

   public static bool TryParse<T>(string value, out T result, bool ignoreCase)
      where T : struct // error CS0702: Constraint cannot be special class 'System.Enum'
   {
      result = default(T);
      try
      {
         result = (T)Enum.Parse(typeof(T), value, ignoreCase);
         return true;
      }
      catch { }

      return false;
   }
}

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm continually shocked that Enum.Parse isn't a generic method.

result = (T)Enum.Parse(typeof(T), value, ignoreCase);

could turn into:

result = Enum.Parse<T>(value, ignoreCase);

Casey Plummer said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

You may want to make use of Enum.IsDefined instead of using a try/catch...

Anonymous said...

The trouble is that Enum.IsDefined is case sensitive.

Unknown said...

Andrew, that is very helpful! Thank you!! I have done all variety of things to make sure I have a good value, try/catch being the worse... (too slow)

sorry it didn't work out for you Jacob, I too would prefer it worked "caseless"

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