Enumerations in Swift for Newbies.

Enumerations are a way of defining new data types.

In this article I will be talking about the basics of Enumerations, or enum for short.

Think of an enum like a dropdown list, it only consists what’s contained in the dropdown list and you can only choose from that specific list.

Enums are also great for developers as it lowers our chances of errors or typos due to providing us autocomplete.

I think the best way to understand enums are just by following along and It should hopefully give you an idea of what they are and how there used.

The syntax for enumerations are structured like so:

Open up playground to follow along.

Let’s use an example where we would be creating a game and we would be displaying the player’s current level status.

Here’s our enum :

As you see we called our enum Levels then a open brace {, followed by each case and closed by }.

This can also be written all on one line like so:

We can now set a variable to a enumeration case like so:

You can also shorten this as well:

You can do a Switch Statement for each case.

If your unfamiliar with Switch cases:

Switch Statements in Swift

Note:

We don’t declare default like we usually do in switch cases.

This is because with enums, there’s no other possibilities. Only what’s in our enums needs to be checked for.

If you don’t exhaust all cases then you’ll need to use default.

Quick Tip:

Instead of each time inside the switch to do Levels.One.

Swift knows we are looking inside the playerLevel so we can simply use .One .

So it would instead look like this:

Nice and clean 👍🏼

Raw Values

Instead of having the values set inside the switch statement, we can actually store them in the enum with something called Raw Values .

Let’s create another enum but this time we are going map them to String and give each enum case a value.

In this enum we have our cases like usual, but this time we have a value for each. In this case we declared it to a String value.

Let’s choose Apple to set into the variable.

Here is when we can grab it’s rawValue.

We simply write this:

That’s it!

That’s the basics of Enumerations in Swift.

I hope this helped!

Like always, feel free to leave a comment or suggest any future topics you’d like to see covered.

Thanks for reading!