System.Type.GetType

Unity Engine
,
1

I am trying to reference enums by using a string with GetType(). I can’t seem to figure out why this doesn’t work when the class and enum are in a namespace. For example:

namespace MyNamespace
{
    public class MyClass
    {
        public enum MyEnum
        {
            Value1,
            Value2,
            Value3
        }
    }
}

My code:

string[] list = Enum.GetNames(Type.GetType("MyNamespace+MyClass+MyEnum"));

Without the namespace, this works fine. Is there a different way to get the namespace or something?

2

Delineate the names, class and enum with periods ( . ) not plus signs.

Basically the same way you’d write it in actual C#.

Why do you want to do this though? Why not just an array of enums?

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3

This is a C#/.net specific method independent of Unity specifically.

Refer to MSDN documentation for documentation pertaining to such things:

Here it’ll give you a break down of the delimiter uses for the string passed to this method.

…

Of course this is mostly useful if you’re reading in the string from somewhere (say you serilized the type). If you’re in C# you don’t need to parse the string you could just say it directly:

string[] list = Enum.GetNames(typeof(MyNamespace.MyClass.MyEnum));

or

string[] list = Enum.GetNames<MyNamespace.MyClass.MyEnum>();
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4

Using periods doesn’t work. When simply doing, MyClass+MyEnum, the plus sign works. not the period. Idk.
I am doing this because I have a UI properties panel that needs to display properties for a wide variety of objects and referencing enums from components is one thing I need to do. Instead of adding enums to the code, one string variable in my scriptable objects can reference which enum is needed. I may resort to just doing an array of enums which the S.O. can reference just as easy, but I will need to add each enum to the array manually.

5

Thank you, the docs helped.

TopNamespace.SubNameSpace.ContainingClass+NestedClass,MyAssembly
1 Like
6

Right, actually yeah types nested in other types are delineated with a plus symbol. I always forget about that.

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