Question

I am writing an interpreter that parses an array of String and assigns each word in that file a numeric value.

What I want to accomplish, is this:

If the word is not found in the enum, call an external method parse() for that particular element of the array.

My code looks similar to this:

private enum Codes {keyword0, keyword1};

switch Codes.valueOf(stringArray[0])
{

case keyword0:
{
    value = 0;
    break;
}
case keyword1:
{
    value = 1;
    break;
}
default:
{
    value = parse(StringArray[0]);
    break;
}
}

Unfortunately, when this finds something that does not equal “keyword0” or “keyword1” in the input, I get

No enum const class

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

When there’s no corresponding enum value, there will always be an IllegalArgumentException thrown. Just catch this, and you’re good.

try {
    switch(Codes.valueOf(stringArray[0])) {
        case keyword0:
           value = 0;
           break;
        case keyword1:
           value = 1;
           break;
    }
}
catch(IllegalArgumentException e) {
    value = parse(stringArray[0]);
}