Get Color Name

[cfirex]

Hi, I've a color pick dialog form, and I need which color is selected by the user and get the name.

I see that some colors have the Name property set to a system color name (yellow, red, etc...) but some others are in the RGB style.

How can I do, to get a valid name or show only a set of colours with a valid system name ?

Thank you.

Hope you understand my problem and sorry for my english

[RobDog888]

This has ben answered before. I remember it. Try a forums search and you will find the thread and its source code example.

[jmcilhinney]

All Colors known by the system can be retrieved using the KnownColor enumeration. Just be aware that that enumeration includes SystemColors too, which are the colours assigned to theme elements.

Dim c As Color
 
For Each value As KnownColor In [Enum].GetValues(GetType(KnownColor))
    c = Color.FromKnownColor(value)
    MessageBox.Show(c.ToArgb().ToString("X"), c.Name)
Next value

You should note from running that code that all the SystemColors are listed first, so that should make it relatively easy to exclude those from your list if you so desire.

[cfirex]

You should note from running that code that all the SystemColors are listed first, so that should make it relatively easy to exclude those from your list if you so desire.

I don't understand sorry, I need to create a custom ColorDialog form for exclude the color without a system name ?

This my simple code for get the color from the color dialog picker:

  
        private void coloreToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            if (colorDialog1.ShowDialog() != DialogResult.Cancel)
            {
                string col = colorDialog1.Color.Name;
                functionColor(col);
            }
        }

where I need to pass a valid color name to the functionColor.

[jmcilhinney]

You should be testing the IsNamedColor property of the selected Color.

Note that it is considered good style to always test for a positive condition where possible, so the tenets of good style dictate that you change this:

if (colorDialog1.ShowDialog() != DialogResult.Cancel)

to this:

if (colorDialog1.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)

By the way, sorry for my VB code before. I often forget that I'm in the C# forum. Call me goldfish.

[jmcilhinney]

In reading the documentation I see that the IsNamedColor property doesn't consider the RGB value of a Color, so even if the Color represents a named Color the property will still return False if the Color was created from an Argb value rather than a name. To see what I mean try this code:

Color c1 = Color.FromArgb(255, 255, 255, 255);
Color c2 = Color.FromKnownColor(KnownColor.White);
Color c3 = Color.FromName("White");
 
MessageBox.Show(c1.ToArgb().ToString("X"), c1.Name);
MessageBox.Show(c2.ToArgb().ToString("X"), c2.Name);
MessageBox.Show(c3.ToArgb().ToString("X"), c3.Name);

All three Colors have the same Argb value but the first one has no common name.

This might suggest that if the user created a custom Color using the dialogue then it would never have a common name, but in some brief testing that didn't seem to be the case. You'd want to test it out yourself to make sure but I'd suggest that the ColorDialog first compares the selected Argb value to KnownColors and then calls FromKnownColor if a match exists.