C# string enumerators

[muaddubby]

Hello all and happy new year.

I've seen several posts floating around asking about string enumerators in C#, and generally speaking, they're not supported.

I've come up with a way around it that lets you create a class which behaves exactly like the regular enumerators (it offers all the functionality a regular enumerator has), and you can store any type of string in it.

The full article can be found here:
http://cookingwithcsha rp.blogspot.com/2007/12/999-c-string-enumerator.html

I hope you find this handy.
All the best!

[Plater]

A nice idea, but your abstract class doesn't really offer any functionality.

The meat is all still done manually in your concrete class:

private static List mPossibleEnumValues = new List()    
{        "Toyota",        "Honda",        "Ford",        "Chrysler",        "Volvo",        "General Motors"    };    
 
static public ECarManufacturers Toyota    
{        
get 
{ 
return new ECarManufacturers(mPossibleEnumValues[0]); 
}    
}    
static public ECarManufacturers Honda    
{        
get 
{ 
return new ECarManufacturers(mPossibleEnumValues[1]); 
}    
}
static public ECarManufacturers Ford    
{        
get 
{ 
return new ECarManufacturers(mPossibleEnumValues[2]); 
}    
}
 

Seems to me your doing all the work right there manually. Not to mention that using .Ford will only return to you a string that says "Ford".
Seems you could bypass all of that and either use JUST the List object, or use a Dictionary or some other collection.

I'm trying to think of a time where having a string as the value would be usefull?
If you have an enum, you can just it's .ToString() to get it's name.

So if you have:

public enum SMTPAuthTypes
    {
 
        NONE = 0,
 
        PLAIN = 1,
 
        LOGIN = 2,
 
        CRAM_MD5 = 3,//maybe dis-allow this one?
    }//end of enum
 

Then you can do this:

string mystring=SMTPAuthTypes.LOGIN.ToString();
//now mystring="LOGIN"
 

You might also find this thread where I asked about ENUMs useful:
http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread733730.html