Question

Does anyone know how to transform a enum value to a human readable value?

For example:

ThisIsValueA should be ‘This is Value A’.

Answer 1

Converting this from a vb code snippet that a certain Ian Horwill left at a blog post long ago… i’ve since used this in production successfully.

    /// <summary>     /// Add spaces to separate the capitalized words in the string,      /// i.e. insert a space before each uppercase letter that is      /// either preceded by a lowercase letter or followed by a      /// lowercase letter (but not for the first char in string).      /// This keeps groups of uppercase letters - e.g. acronyms - together.     /// </summary>     /// <param name='pascalCaseString'>A string in PascalCase</param>     /// <returns></returns>     public static string Wordify(string pascalCaseString)     {                     Regex r = new Regex('(?<=[a-z])(?<x>[A-Z])|(?<=.)(?<x>[A-Z])(?=[a-z])');         return r.Replace(pascalCaseString, ' ${x}');     } 

(requires, ‘using System.Text.RegularExpressions;’)

Thus:

Console.WriteLine(Wordify(ThisIsValueA.ToString())); 

Would return,

'This Is Value A'. 

It’s much simpler, and less redundant than providing Description attributes.

Attributes are useful here only if you need to provide a layer of indirection (which the question didn’t ask for).