Question

Is there a workaround to be able to use colons as the key in enums?

public enum foo {
   _DEFAULT_GET("com.foo.my.package");   // works fine
   _PREFIX_GET("com.foo.my.other.package");
   _PRE:CODE_GET("com.foo.yet.another.package");  // <-- how do I escape this colon?
}

EDIT: before I get downvoted into oblivion, I’d like to add that there was a naming convention change that was handed down. It has caused quite a fun debate in the team! 🙂

Answer 1

No, : is not a legal character in a Java identifer.

The legal characters are, a-z A-Z, 0-9, (the {unicode letters}), _ and $

You’re trying to do the same as

private String he:llo; // not valid since : is a language construct, used in places such as labels

Also your program shouldn’t depend on the names you give to the fields. Unless you do reflection; and you shouldn’t need that, either…

Note that you shouldnt use the $ in your identifiers since its used by code-generators mostly, such as javac when it compiles a class containing an inner class $ is used as separator.

As @Kevin.K mentioned, a-zA-Z is actually unicode letter code.