Parse the fully qualified string representation of an enum, including namespace/type

I’m aware of Enum.TryParse(), but it doesn’t handle the namespace and type being present in the string. Say I have the following enum:

namespace MyNamespace
{
    enum MyEnum
    {
        One,
        Two,
        Three
    }
}

I can’t use Enum.TryParse("MyNamespace.MyEnum.One", out MyEnum xxx). It returns false because “MyNamespace.MyEnum.One” is not recognized.

Enum.TryParse("One", out MyEnum xxx) works fine.

Is there a way I can do that with any other mechanism in .Net?

Answers:

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Method 1

One simple approach would be to write a small utility method to just parse the token after the last period character:

public static class EnumHelper
{
    public static bool TryParse<TEnum>(
        string value,
        out TEnum result) where TEnum : struct
    {
        string toparse = value;

        int loc = value.LastIndexOf('.');
        if (loc > 0)
        {
            toparse = value.Substring(loc + 1);
        }

        return Enum.TryParse(toparse, out result);
    }
}

Method 2

Enum.TryParse expects you to know which type of enum you are expecting;

Enum.TryParse(typeof(MyEnum), "One", out var value);

You could try to parse a type from a string first;

var type = Type.GetType("MyNamespace.MyEnum");
Enum.TryParse(type, "One", out var value);

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0