Question

Say I have an enum,

public enum Colours
{
    Red,
    Blue
}

The only way I can see of parsing them is doing something like:

string colour = "Green";
var col = (Colours)Enum.Parse(typeOf(Colours),colour);

This will throw a System.ArgumentException because “Green” is not a member of the Colours enum.

Now I really hate wrapping code in try/catch’s, is there no neater way to do this that doesn’t involve me iterating through each Colours enum, and doing a string comparison against colour?

Answer 1

Use Enum.IsDefined() first, to save yourself from wrapping in a try/catch. It will return a boolean value of whether or not the input is a valid member of that enum.