How to use enum in Swift

Gurjit Singh
2 min readMar 7, 2023
Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Enumerations defines a type for group of related values.

Enumerations (enum) enables you to write code in a type safe way. Enum is very useful while defining common type of values. You don’t have to provide value while defining enum.

Syntax

You can declare enumerations with enum keyword.

enum SomeEnumerations {

}

Here is a basic example of defining enumeration. You can use case keyword to define new enumeration cases.

enum Direction {
case north
case south
case east
case west
}

You can also define cases in single line rather than multiple lines. For example,

enum DaysOfWeek {
case sunday, monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday
}

You can assign enum value to new variable in following way.

var day = DaysOfWeek.sunday

Matching enum values using switch statement

You can match value of enum using switch statement in following way.

var direction = Direction.west

switch direction {
case .east:
print("Marked with E")
case .west:
print("Marked with W")
case .north:
print("Marked with N")
case .south:
print("Marked with…

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Gurjit Singh

I’m Computer Science graduate and an iOS Engineer who writes about Swift and iOS development. Follow me on twitter @gurjitpt and for more articles www.gurjit.co