2

i have to create an enum that contains values that are having spaces

public enum MyEnum { My cart, Selected items, Bill } 

This is giving error. Using concatenated words like MyCart or using underscore My_Cart is not an option. Please guide.

Thanks in advance.

5

5 Answers 5

5

From enum (C# Reference)

An enumerator may not contain white space in its name.

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Comments have been posted to your question regarding displaying the enum without the underscore, if you so wish.
@HotTester You can use DisplayAttribute - See my marvelous answer to the question stackoverflow.com/questions/1101872/how-to-set-space-on-enum/…
2

Enum just cant have space! What do you need it for? If you need it simply for display purpose, you can stick with underscore and write an extension method for your enum so that you can ask for the display text by doing this (assuming your ext method is call DisplayText). Internally you just implement the DisplayText method to substitute "_" with space

MyEnum.My_Cart.DisplayText(); // which return "My Cart" 

Comments

1

As per the C# specification, "An enumerator may not contain white space in its name." (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sbbt4032.aspx) Why do you need this?

3 Comments

I didn't write the message, MS did, and I guess they made a typo! =) (the text i quoted is from the MS article I provided a link for)
Quite interesting the msdn link says enum as enumerator ! A msdn bug ?
Oops, sorry, I did note others using the same verbology.
1

**

enums can't have spaces in C#!" you say. Here is the way System.ComponentModel.DescriptionAttribute to add a more friendly description to the enum values. The example enum can be rewritten like **

public enum DispatchTypes { Inspection = 1, LocalSale = 2,[Description("Local Sale")] ReProcessing=3,[Description("Re-Processing")] Shipment=4, Transfer=5 } 

Hence it returns "LocalSale" or "ReProcessing", when we use .ToString()

Comments

-2

I agree the use of DisplayText if you are following convention. But if you need different display value to represent the enum constant, then you could have a constructor passing that value.

public enum MyEnum { My cart ("Cart"), Selected items("All Selected Items"), Bill("Payment");

private String displayValue; private MyEnum(String displayValue) { 

this.displayValue = displayValue; }
public String displayText() { return this.displayValue; }

}

You can have a displayText method or a toString method which would return the displayValue

1 Comment

This doesn't compile - an Enum is simply a list of values, it cannot contain members, constructors, etc. The most you can do is assign a specific integer value to a constant, but even then you cannot use spaces in the constant names.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.