Java 13: Enhancements to Switch Expressions

Fahd ShariffNovember 14th, 2019Last Updated: November 5th, 2019

0 241 1 minute read

You may remember from my previous post that, in Java 12, the traditional switch statement was enhanced so that it could be used as an expression. In Java 13, there has been a further change to this feature. The break statement can no longer return a value. Instead, you have to use the new yield statement, as shown below:

final int result = switch (input) {
    case 0, 1 -> 1;
    case 2 -> 4;
    case 3 -> {
      System.out.println("Calculating: " + input);
      final int output = compute(input);
      System.out.println("Result: " + output);
      yield output;
    }
    default -> throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid input " + input);
};

Note that this is still a preview language feature, which means that it must be explicitly enabled in the Java compiler and runtime using the --enable-preview flag.

Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Fahd Shariff, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Java 13: Enhancements to Switch Expressions

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