Switch

Quick reference

• 00:04 In the last video, we talked about if-then conditional statements.
• 00:08 In this video, we're gonna talk about switch,
• 00:09 which is another type of conditional statement.
• 00:12 And if allows you to test, if this, do this.
• 00:15 Else, do that.
• 00:16 It's sort of one or two things, right?
• 00:18 Or you can add an else if to add a few more.
• 00:20 Switch, on the other hand, you're taking a bunch of set things and
• 00:24 testing against each one.
• 00:26 So that may not make a whole lot of sense, but
• 00:29 this is, let me just highlight this stuff and have it over.
• 00:33 So this is the basic structure of a switch.
• 00:36 You have your condition that you're testing.
• 00:38 And then case1, do some stuff, and then break.
• 00:42 Case2 ,do some stuff, and then break.
• 00:45 If neither of these cases are true, slip down to the default and do stuff.
• 00:49 Basically, you're testing against cases.
• 00:52 Let's create one of these so you cans see exactly what's going on here.
• 00:55 Let's create a variable called car.
• 00:57 And, I'm gonna set it equal to ford.
• 01:00 So if we create a switch, we start out with switch, i-t-c-h.
• 01:05 And then, let's pass it in our car, okay?
• 01:09 Now let's create some cases.
• 01:12 Create the case of ford.
• 01:16 Colon.
• 01:17 Now let's echo out, You like Fords, semicolon, break.
• 01:23 Now if any of these are true, this break will stop this from continuing on.
• 01:28 So let's go, case, Chevy, colon, echo,
• 01:34 You like Chevy's, I don't know break.
• 01:39 And then finally, our default echo,
• 01:44 You don't like anything!
• 01:48 Now we don't need a break because this is the last thing here, so
• 01:52 there's nothing to break from.
• 01:54 It already is gonna break.
• 01:56 You can put your default up at the top if you want.
• 01:58 If you do, you need to put a break.
• 02:00 Let's save this, come back here, and hit reload.
• 02:03 You like Fords.
• 02:04 Let's put, I don't know, GMC.
• 02:07 That's a type of car, right?
• 02:09 Hit reload.
• 02:09 You don't like anything!
• 02:10 Cuz our variable is GMC, so that's our condition right here, and is GMC a Ford?
• 02:17 No. Is it a Chevy?
• 02:18 No. Well actually, we should lowercase that.
• 02:21 So since neither of these two cases is true, it echoes out our default,
• 02:25 You don't like anything!
• 02:26 Most of the time, to be perfectly honest with you, I'll use an if-else statement.
• 02:31 Because if you think about it, you could do this in an if-else statement
• 02:34 pretty easily, and if-else statements are just really easy to use.
• 02:38 Switch is a little bit more complicated, a little bit more work to do the same thing.
• 02:42 The reason why you might use a switch,
• 02:44 is if you had 50 different cases you wanted to test against, then it might make
• 02:49 sense to use a switch just to break it up and make it easier to read or whatever.
• 02:53 But I find, after 20 years of doing this, I hardly ever use a switch.
• 02:57 I'll just use an if statement, or
• 02:59 an if-else statement, or an if-else-if statement.
• 03:02 But there you have it.
• 03:03 That's the sort of the last main conditional statement we wanna talk about.
• 03:06 In the next video, we're gonna talk about loops.
• 03:09 Loops are pretty important to programming and a lot of fun to play with.
• 03:12 And that's all for this video

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