How to get names of enum entries?

If you only search for the names and iterate later use:

Object.keys(myEnum).map(key => myEnum[key]).filter(value => typeof value === 'string') as string[];

For me an easier, practical and direct way to understand what is going on, is that the following enumeration:

enum colors { red, green, blue };

Will be converted essentially to this:

var colors = { red: 0, green: 1, blue: 2,
               [0]: "red", [1]: "green", [2]: "blue" }

Because of this, the following will be true:

colors.red === 0
colors[colors.red] === "red"
colors["red"] === 0

This creates a easy way to get the name of an enumerated as follows:

var color: colors = colors.red;
console.log("The color selected is " + colors[color]);

It also creates a nice way to convert a string to an enumerated value.

var colorName: string = "green";
var color: colors = colors.red;
if (colorName in colors) color = colors[colorName];

The two situations above are far more common situation, because usually you are far more interested in the name of a specific value and serializing values in a generic way.


The code you posted will work; it will print out all the members of the enum, including the values of the enum members. For example, the following code:

enum myEnum { bar, foo }

for (var enumMember in myEnum) {
   console.log("enum member: ", enumMember);
}

Will print the following:

Enum member: 0
Enum member: 1
Enum member: bar
Enum member: foo

If you instead want only the member names, and not the values, you could do something like this:

for (var enumMember in myEnum) {
   var isValueProperty = Number(enumMember) >= 0
   if (isValueProperty) {
      console.log("enum member: ", myEnum[enumMember]);
   }
}

That will print out just the names:

Enum member: bar  
Enum member: foo

Caveat: this slightly relies on an implementation detail: TypeScript compiles enums to a JS object with the enum values being members of the object. If TS decided to implement them different in the future, the above technique could break.


Though the answer is already provided, Almost no one pointed to the docs

Here's a snippet

enum Enum {
    A
}
let nameOfA = Enum[Enum.A]; // "A"

Keep in mind that string enum members do not get a reverse mapping generated at all.