How to check if any flags of a flag combination are set?

Question

Let\'s say I have this enum:

[Flags]
enum Letters
{
     A = 1,
     B = 2,
     C = 4,
     AB = A | B,
     All = A | B | C,
}

To check i

Answer 1

To check if for example AB is set I can do this:

if((letter & Letters.AB) == Letters.AB)

Is there a simpler way to check if any of the flags of a combined flag constant are set than the following?

This checks that both A and B are set, and ignores whether any other flags are set.

if((letter & Letters.A) == Letters.A || (letter & Letters.B) == Letters.B)

This checks that either A or B is set, and ignores whether any other flags are set or not.

This can be simplified to:

if(letter & Letters.AB)

Here's the C for binary operations; it should be straightforward to apply this to C#:

enum {
     A = 1,
     B = 2,
     C = 4,
     AB = A | B,
     All = AB | C,
};

int flags = A|C;

bool anything_and_a = flags & A;

bool only_a = (flags == A);

bool a_and_or_c_and_anything_else = flags & (A|C);

bool both_ac_and_anything_else = (flags & (A|C)) == (A|C);

bool only_a_and_c = (flags == (A|C));

Incidentally, the naming of the variable in the question's example is the singular 'letter', which might imply that it represents only a single letter; the example code makes it clear that its a set of possible letters and that multiple values are allowed, so consider renaming the variable 'letters'.