Wimdows.NET

Generic Parse method on Enum - a solution

David Findley writes about how he wishes we had a generic Parse method on the Enum class in .NET 2.0.

Though I agree in principle, it's actually quite trivial to create a generic static class with a Parse method, which alleviates some of the pain.

Here's my stab at it:

    public static class EnumUtil<T>
    {
        public static T Parse(string s)
        {
            return (T)Enum.Parse(typeof(T), s);
        }
    }

Say we have the following enum:

    public enum Color
    {
        Black,
        White,
        Blue,
        Red,
        Green
    }

We can now simply use the generic EnumUtil class as follows:

Color c = EnumUtil<Color>.Parse("Black");

I feel that this helper method doesn't actually warrant a class in its own right, so you may want to add it to one of your Util classes (if you happen to have a generic one!) instead.