How to loop or get enum names and values in C#

Steps to loop or get enum names and values in C#

1. Use C# Enum.GetValues() method to get all possible values of Enum.
2. And to get all names of enum entries Use C# Enum.GetNames().
3. Then, enumerate or loop the C# enum names or values using foreach or for loop.

On this page

Loop or Get Enum Values using C# Enum.GetValues() #

We will take an example to understand it further.

I have created a Log level enum which contains ERROR,WARN,INFO and DEBUG levels as shown below.

public enum LogLevel
{
   ERROR=1, 
   WARN=2, 
   INFO=3, 
   DEBUG=4
}

First we will get all possible values of the enum in C# using Enum.GetValues() method

 var enumValues = Enum.GetValues((typeof(LogLevel)));

Now we will loop through enum values in C# and print them in console using foreach loop

foreach (LogLevel enumValue in (LogLevel[])enumValues)
{
    Console.WriteLine(enumValue);
}

Output:

ERROR 
WARN 
INFO 
DEBUG

Casting to Array is not necessary but it does give some performance benefit.

And further to loop all enum integer values we can use Enum.GetHashCode() method

foreach (LogLevel enumValue in (LogLevel[])enumValues)
{
    Console.WriteLine(enumValue.GetHashCode());
    //or
    //Console.WriteLine((int)enumValue);
}

Output:
1 
2
3
4

Or we can simply cast the enum to appropriate type i.e, (int)enumValue.

Get int value from Enum

Further we can use C# linq to get values of C# enum as shown below

var enumValues = Enum.GetValues(typeof(LogLevel))
                .Cast<LogLevel>()
                .OrderBy(value =>(int)value);

Loop or Get Enum Names using C# Enum.GetNames() #

To get all possible enum names in c# we can use Enum.GetNames() method as shown below

var enumNames = Enum.GetNames((typeof(LogLevel)));

Enum.GetNames() method will return list of strings which contain all enum names. We can loop them further to know all possible enum names.

foreach (string enumName in enumNames)
{
    Console.WriteLine(enumName);
}