Question

I have the following enum :

public enum Rank{
   FIRST,
   SECOND
}

Whenever a toString() function is called on an enum (or its used inside a string literal), I want FIRST_RANK returned (instead of the string ‘FIRST‘, as is default). If I override the toString() function like :

@Override
public String toString(){
  return this.toString() + "_RANK";
}

But this would obviously lead to recursion. The problem is that I need to use the default toString() implementation of enums, and there is no superclass of enums whose toString() I can call.

Answer 1

Whenever you want the name of that enum instance, you should use the name() method. In your example:

@Override public String toString() {
  return this.name() + "_RANK";
}