switch

Integral-selector is an expression that produces an integral value. The switch compares the result of integral-selector to each integral-value. If it finds a match, the corresponding statement (simple or compound) executes. If no match occurs, the default statement executes.

You will notice in the above definition that each case ends with a break, which causes execution to jump to the end of the switch body. This is the conventional way to build a switch statement, but the break is optional. If it is missing, the code for the following case statements execute until a break is encountered. Although you don't usually want this kind of behavior, it can be useful to an experienced programmer. Note the last statement, for the default, doesn't have a break because the execution just falls through to where the break would have taken it anyway. You could put a break at the end of the default statement with no harm if you considered it important for style's sake.

The switch statement is a clean way to implement multi-way selection (i.e., selecting from among a number of different execution paths), but it requires a selector that evaluates to an integral value such as int or char. If you want to use, for example, a string or a floating-point number as a selector, it won't work in a switch statement. For non-integral types, you must use a series of if statements.

Here's an example that creates letters randomly and determines whether they're vowels or consonants:

Since Math.random( ) generates a value between 0 and 1, you need only multiply it by the upper bound of the range of numbers you want to produce (26 for the letters in the alphabet) and add an offset to establish the lower bound.

Although it appears you're switching on a character here, the switch statement is actually using the integral value of the character. The singly-quoted characters in the case statements also produce integral values that are used for comparison.

Notice how the cases can be "stacked" on top of each other to provide multiple matches for a particular piece of code. You should also be aware that it's essential to put the break statement at the end of a particular case, otherwise control will simply drop through and continue processing on the next case.