In a previous blog post, I demonstrated how Java’ enums that contain one or more values/objects can be emulated with C#. One thing bothered me, though: the switch statement and how inconvenient it was to determine the proper type. Worst of all, it was not type-safe. In my simple example, it was easy because I was using strings. Imagine your fake-enum does not contain a string to quickly identify the instance.

Well, there is a prettier workaround – and it involves an actual enum. I was thinking about how the same could be done in C++ and in C++, you can have type conversion operators. Then I searched if such a feature also exists in C#, and sure enough, it does.

Update August 28, 2021

I have written a follow-up that improves on the following solution using a type conversion operator overload.

When I started dabbling in C#, I wondered if it supports values in enums. In Java, an enum instance can have properties (called fields in Java lingo) associated with the enum’s literals. By taking advantage of this feature, you can encode more information in an enum, like a string, for example, or a constant number. You can even embed instantiated class objects, maybe to associate an object factory with a literal.

In my use case, I wanted to achieve a form of a key-value-pair mapping. I require certain illegal characters in the NTFS file or directory names to be replaced with a given code. I use HTML encoding for my needs because I can simply look up the values online if I need to.

Here is the Java reference example. First, let me start with the basic enum definition (I use Lombok to auto-generate boilerplate code like the constructor and accessors).

@Getter
@RequiredArgsConstructor
enum CharacterReplacementCode  {
    COLON(":", "&58;"),
    POUND("#", "&35;"),
    QUESTION_MARK("?", "&63;"); 

    private final String character;
    private final String replacement;
    
    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return String.format("Character '%s' substituted by code '%s'", character, replacement); 
    }
}