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Enumerations

Enumerations

An enumeration is a set of named integer constants that is declared using the enum keyword.

Example

enum Gender 
{
  Male,
  Female
}

By default, the integer values start at 0 and increase by 1, for each enumeration name i.e. Male = 0, Female = 1 etc.

These can be overridden by specifying an integer value for any of the enumeration names.

enum Gender 
{
  Male = 1,
  Female
}

In this case, the integer values will start at 1 and increase from there.

To use an enum, you can declare a variable of its type and assign a value to it:

Gender myVar = Gender.Male;

You can also cast an enumeration name value to it's underlying integer value and visa versa:

Console.WriteLine($"Male: {(int)Gender.Male}");
Console.WriteLine($"Female: {(int)Gender.Female}");

Male: 1
Female: 2