Convert string to Enum in Python

I wonder what's the correct way of converting (deserializing) a string to a Python's Enum class. Seems like getattr(YourEnumType, str) does the job, but I'm not sure if it's safe enough.

Just to be more specific, I would like to convert a 'debug'string to an Enum object like this:

class BuildType(Enum):
    debug = 200
    release = 400

This functionality is already built in to Enum [1]:

>>> from enum import Enum
>>> class Build(Enum):
...   debug = 200
...   build = 400
... 
>>> Build['debug']
<Build.debug: 200>

The member names are case sensitive, so if user-input is being converted you need to make sure case matches:

an_enum = input('Which type of build?')
build_type = Build[an_enum.lower()]

[1] Official docs: Enum programmatic access

Another alternative (especially useful if your strings don't map 1-1 to your enum cases) is to add a staticmethod to your Enum, e.g.:

class QuestionType(enum.Enum):
    MULTI_SELECT = "multi"
    SINGLE_SELECT = "single"

    @staticmethod
    def from_str(label):
        if label in ('single', 'singleSelect'):
            return QuestionType.SINGLE_SELECT
        elif label in ('multi', 'multiSelect'):
            return QuestionType.MULTI_SELECT
        else:
            raise NotImplementedError

Then you can do question_type = QuestionType.from_str('singleSelect')