Open Source: colors_parser

While working on a Flutter project, I was surprised to find that I could not parse a string representation of a Material Colors value. I am not sure why this is not supported directly by Google, but I really wanted to be able to do something like...

    var color = Colors.parse("blue");

I assumed there must be something already floating around on the Web to take care of this, but was disappointed to find that...I could not find it. My mother (sadly passed a few years ago) would no doubt have said this is due to my poor Internet search skills. So, I created and published a Dart/Flutter package (colors_parser) that you can use until Google realizes their oversight and adds this directly to Colors. With the package added to your Flutter project, you can...

    var color = cp.parse("blue");

Yay! Sure, you can specify all the named Colors including both MaterialColor and MaterialAccentColor values. Naturally, you can also specify indexed color shades like "blue[300]" as well as black and white variants with different opacities like "black54" and hex color values like "#FF42A5F5".

And, you can even convert back to a String...

    print("color: ${cp.toColorsString(cp.parse("blue"))}");

Not too bad for just a bit of code. Now if I just knew why Google does not support it and my mother was around to help with my Internet searches.