An enum or enumeration type is a special data type that represents a group of constants. It is a value type defined by a set of named constants of the underlying integral numeric type.
null value.To define an enumeration type, use the enum keyword.
<AccessModifiers> enum <EnumName>
{
constant1,
constant2,
.,
.,
constantN
}
public, internal and private.The constants' names in C# follow the PascalCase rule according to the Microsoft's official C# coding convention. So, the naming of constants in one particular enumeration follows the same principle.
Let's consider a simple example of defining an enumeration for the days of the week. The constants in this enumeration are the names of the days.
enum Days
{
Sunday,
Monday,
Tuesday,
Wednesday,
Thursday,
Friday,
Saturday
}
By default, the compiler will assign integer values to each constants starting with 0 if the values are not assigned. The first constant of an enum will be 0, and the value of each successive constant is increased by 1.
You can access the enum variable as shown below.
Days day = Days.Tuesday;
Console.WriteLine("The day is {0}",day);
Let's run the above code and it will print the following output on the console window.
The day is Tuesday
Here is another enum example where we have assigned a value to the first constant only, so the compiler will assign the values to the remaining constants.
enum Months
{
January = 1,
February,
March,
April,
May,
June,
July,
August,
September,
October,
November,
December
}
When you assign a different value to the enum first constant and it is other than the default value, it will automatically assign incremental values to the other members sequentially.
You can also assign different values to each constant as shown below.
enum Categories
{
Sports = 1,
Arts = 3,
Clothing = 7,
Fashion = 15,
Electronics = 21,
HealthCare = 33
}
To get the numerical representation of the constant, you can convert its value to an int as shown below.
Categories category = Categories.HealthCare;
int intVal = (int)category;
Console.WriteLine("The numerical value of {0} is {1}", category, intVal);
Let's run the above code and it will print the following output on the console window.
The numerical value of HealthCare in 33
All the examples related to the enumeration are available in the Enumeration.cs file of the source code. Download the source code and try out all the examples for better understanding.