Question

I have 5 boolean variables a,b,c,d and e. So for each different combination of true and false of each variable there is a different print statement.

Say for example:

a b c d e — Print Statements

T T T T T — Print All trues

T T T T F — Print Some Text

T T T F F — Print Some other text

……..

There could be 32 different possible combinations. I’m writing a java code. So the question is for every condition there should be a different statement printed out. So what could be the best possible solution to handle this instead of the regular if statements which makes the code more confusing and unmanageable?

Answer 1

One option would be to basically build a bitmask:

int mask = (a ? 1 : 0) |
           (b ? 2 : 0) |
           (c ? 4 : 0) |
           (d ? 8 : 0) |
           (e ? 16 : 0);

System.out.println(statements[mask]);

… where statements is an array of length 32. So in your case, statements[31] would be “All trues”, and statements[30] would be “Some Text” etc.