Flags attribute

When you create an Enum you can add the [Flags] attribute if you want to use it as a bit mask. for example lets say you where running a food stand at the beach and you where selling:

Item	Decimal	Binary
Pop	1	0000001
Chips	2	0000010
CandyBar	4	0000100
Gyro	8	0001000
Shwarma	16	0010000
Pizza	32	0100000
Pop	64	1000000

Now that we have our values if we where to have a bitwise OR on any combination of products lets, do pop and chips we'd get: 01 or 10 = 11; 11 being the binary equivalent of 3. the significance of this is as follows

using System;

namespace EnumExample

{

    class Program

    {

        [Flags]

        enum Food : short

        {

            Pop = 1, Chips = 2, CandyBar = 4, Gyro = 8, Shwarma = 16, Pizza = 32, Spuds = 64

        }

        static void Main(string[] args)

        {

            var f1 = Food.Chips;//01

            var f2 = Food.Pop; //10

            Console.WriteLine($"{f1} has a value of {(short)f1}");

            Console.WriteLine();

            Console.WriteLine($"{f2} has a value of {(short)f2}");

            Console.WriteLine();

            Console.WriteLine($"{f1 | f2} have a value of {(short)(f1 | f2)}");

        }

    }

}

now the result is


if we didn't decorate our enum with the [Flags] attribute, when we tried to do a bit-wise OR on f1 and f2 we'd just get the numeric value of three, but because we used the [Flags] attribute we see Pop, Chips instead.