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• Generic Parse method on Enum - a solution

  Thursday, July 6, 2006

  C# enum

  6 Comments

  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.
  
  

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