Search for a string in Enum and return the Enum

Question

I have an enumeration:

public enum MyColours
{
    Red,
    Green,
    Blue,
    Yellow,
    Fuchsia,
    Aqua,
    Orange
}

and I have a s

Answer 1

You can use Enum.Parse to get an enum value from the name. You can iterate over all values with Enum.GetNames, and you can just cast an int to an enum to get the enum value from the int value.

Like this, for example:

public MyColours GetColours(string colour)
{
    foreach (MyColours mc in Enum.GetNames(typeof(MyColours))) {
        if (mc.ToString().Contains(colour)) {
            return mc;
        }
    }
    return MyColours.Red; // Default value
}

or:

public MyColours GetColours(string colour)
{
    return (MyColours)Enum.Parse(typeof(MyColours), colour, true); // true = ignoreCase
}

The latter will throw an ArgumentException if the value is not found, you may want to catch it inside the function and return the default value.