Question

i’m working on parsing a text project where in , i have to match the match the text and get the keywords from the text and perform some actions accordingly.

Now , i’m trying to use enum for matching the text Eg. all the conditions, any condition, none, alteast one,and or etc. i’m trying use enum as the key words might change later,
Is it possible to store string values in enum.

public enum condition 
{ 
    type1 = "all the conditions", 
    type2 = "any of the conditions" 
}

i know it is not like normal enum usage,can any one help

Answer 1

You could use readonly string properties:

public class Condition
{
    public static readonly string Type1 = "All_The_Conditions";
    public static readonly string Type2 = "Any_Conditions";
}

Use it like this:

if(condition_variable == Condition.Type1)//will do a string compare here.
{
 ...
}

BUT

This above solution would however NOT work with switch statements. In which case you could use const

public class Condition
{//this could be a better solution..
    public const string Type1 = "All_The_Conditions";
    public const string Type2 = "Any_Conditions";
}

You could use it like this:

switch (condition_variable)
{
    case Condition.Type1://can only be done with const
     ....
    break;
}

See this post for static readonly vs const variables.

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To Expand on enums (See MSDN):

They have a default underlying type of int. You can change the underlying type to one of the following integral types : byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, or ulong.

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Thanks to @Bryan and @R0MANARMY for helping me improve my answer.