Question

Im quite new to Java and i have stumbled upon the following problem.

Im reading a list of movies from a txt file, one of the fields is a string representation of what genre(s) the movie is classified as, aswell as a numerical representation of 1-5 signifying that the movie has recieved one or more awards.

eks. one movie could have the following value in this field “12bSt”
this would signify that the movie is a b = biographical, S = sports, 2 = won an academy award.
atm i do this:

    String[] genreStringToArray(String genre) {
    char[] genreCharArray = genre.toCharArray(); 
    this.genreArr = new String[genreCharArray.length];
    for (int i = 0; i < genreCharArray.length; i++) {
        switch (genreCharArray[i]) {
            case 'a': genreArr[i] = "Action";       break;
            case 'A': genreArr[i] = "Animation";        break;
            case 'b': genreArr[i] = "biographical";     break;
            case 'c': genreArr[i] = "comedy";       break;
            case 'C': genreArr[i] = "children";     break;
            case 'd': genreArr[i] = "drama";        break;
            case 'D': genreArr[i] = "documentary";      break;
            case 'e': genreArr[i] = "epic";         break;
                                 ..... etc
            case 2:genreArr[i] = "Academy award";       break;
            case 3:genreArr[i] = "Palme d`or";      break;
            case 4:genreArr[i] = "Sight & sound";       break;
            case 5:genreArr[i] = "AFI top 100";     break;
        }
    }
    return genreArr;
}

my question is, what implementation would be more effective than this?

Answer 1

Use a map with the character (or just a string) as the key, the string as the value.

Map<Character, String> genres = new HashMap<Character, String>() {{
    put('b', "biographical");
    put('C', "Children");
    put('2', "Academy Award");
    // etc...
}};

String genre = "b2C";

List<String> info = new ArrayList<String>();
for (int i = 0; i < genre.length(); i++) {
    info.add(genres.get(genre.charAt(i));
}

System.out.println(StringUtils.join(info, ", "));

Outputs: biographical, Academy Award, Children

Essentially the same thing could be done with enums, and if you need to pass around that info, it might be better to do it in a typesafe way.