Question

I came across some Java syntax that I haven’t seen before. I was wondering if someone could tell me what’s going on here.

for (ObjectType objectName : collectionName.getObjects())

Answer 1

It’s called a for-each or enhanced for statement. See the JLS §14.14.2.

It’s syntactic sugar provided by the compiler for iterating over Iterables and arrays. The following are equivalent ways to iterate over a list:

List<Foo> foos = ...;
for (Foo foo : foos)
{
    foo.bar();
}

// equivalent to:
List<Foo> foos = ...;
for (Iterator<Foo> iter = foos.iterator(); iter.hasNext();)
{
    Foo foo = iter.next();
    foo.bar();
}

and these are two equivalent ways to iterate over an array:

int[] nums = ...;
for (int num : nums)
{
    System.out.println(num);
}

// equivalent to:
int[] nums = ...;
for (int i=0; i<nums.length; i++)
{
    int num = nums[i];
    System.out.println(num);
}

Further reading

• How is Java's for loop code generated by the compiler
• The For-Each Loop