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.