Question

Is there a way to create a method that gets an enum type as a parameter, and returns a generic list of the enum underlying type from it’s values, no matter if the underlying type is int\short byte etc’…
I saw this answer of Jon Skeet, but it looks way too complicated.

Answer 1

If you want to pass in a Type, it can’t really be usefully generic – you’d have to return a single type that isn’t directly related to the input, hence something like:

    public static Array GetUnderlyingEnumValues(Type type)
    {
        Array values = Enum.GetValues(type);
        Type underlyingType = Enum.GetUnderlyingType(type);
        Array arr = Array.CreateInstance(underlyingType, values.Length);
        for (int i = 0; i < values.Length; i++)
        {
            arr.SetValue(values.GetValue(i), i);
        }
        return arr;
    }

This is a strongly-typed vector underneath, so you could cast that to int[] etc.