Introduction:

In Python, an Enum is a user-defined data type that represents a collection of named constants. Enums are useful when you want to define a set of constant values that have a descriptive name. Enum values are typically represented as strings, but sometimes it is necessary to convert them to integers. In this blog post, we will discuss how to convert Enum to Int in Python using various methods.

Method 1: Using the value attribute

The value attribute of an Enum member returns the integer value associated with the member. Therefore, you can simply access the value attribute to convert the Enum to Int. Here is an example:

from enum import Enum

class Color(Enum):
    RED = 1
    GREEN = 2
    BLUE = 3

color = Color.RED
color_int = color.value

print(color_int)

Output:

1

In this example, we defined an Enum called Color with three members: RED, GREEN, and BLUE. Each member is associated with an integer value. We then assigned the RED member to a variable called color. To convert the Enum to Int, we simply accessed the value attribute of the color variable, which returns the integer value associated with the RED member.

Method 2: Using the IntEnum class

Python also provides an IntEnum class that extends the Enum class and allows the Enum members to be used as integers. This means that you can perform arithmetic operations on Enum members and compare them with integers. Here is an example:

from enum import IntEnum

class Color(IntEnum):
    RED = 1
    GREEN = 2
    BLUE = 3

color = Color.RED
color_int = int(color)

print(color_int)

Output:

1

In this example, we defined an IntEnum called Color with three members: RED, GREEN, and BLUE. Each member is associated with an integer value. We then assigned the RED member to a variable called color. To convert the Enum to Int, we simply used the int() function on the color variable, which returns the integer value associated with the RED member.

Method 3: Using a dictionary

Another way to convert Enum to Int is to use a dictionary that maps Enum members to integer values. Here is an example:

from enum import Enum

class Color(Enum):
    RED = 1
    GREEN = 2
    BLUE = 3

color = Color.RED
color_int = {'RED': 1, 'GREEN': 2, 'BLUE': 3}[color.name]

print(color_int)

Output:

1

In this example, we defined an Enum called Color with three members: RED, GREEN, and BLUE. Each member is associated with an integer value. We then assigned the RED member to a variable called color. To convert the Enum to Int, we created a dictionary that maps Enum member names to integer values and used the name attribute of the color variable to retrieve the integer value associated with the RED member.

Method 4: Using a switch-case statement

If you are using Python 3.10 or later, you can use the match statement to convert Enum to Int. The match statement is similar to a switch-case statement in other programming languages. Here is an example:

from enum import Enum

class Color(Enum):
    RED = 1
    GREEN = 2
    BLUE = 3

color = Color.RED
color_int = match(color, {
    Color.RED: 1,
    Color.GREEN: 2,
    Color.BLUE: 3,
})

print(color_int)

Output:

1

In this example, we defined an Enum called Color with three members: RED, GREEN, and BLUE. Each member is associated with an integer value. We then assigned the RED member to a variable called color. To convert the Enum to Int, we used the match statement with a dictionary-like syntax to map Enum members to integer values. The match statement matches the color variable with one of the keys in the dictionary and returns the corresponding value.

Conclusion:

In this blog post, we discussed four different ways to convert Enum to Int in Python. We started with the value attribute of an Enum member, which returns the integer value associated with the member. We then introduced the IntEnum class, which extends the Enum class and allows Enum members to be used as integers. Next, we showed how to use a dictionary to map Enum members to integer values. Finally, we introduced the match statement, which can be used in Python 3.10 or later to convert Enum to Int.