Switch Statement

Quick reference

• 00:04 All right, we've been talking about if-else logic.
• 00:06 And there's another logic thing that is a little unique, and it's similar
• 00:10 to the if-else statement, but it's very specific, and it's called the switch.
• 00:15 And the switch allows you to be very specific about your code blocks and
• 00:20 make decisions based on a very specific set of criteria, right?
• 00:25 So it's a little hard to explain.
• 00:27 Let's just go ahead and make one.
• 00:28 Let's create a string, and we're going to call it day.
• 00:34 And let's set it equal to Monday, all right, so that's our day.
• 00:35 So we want to create a switch statement.
• 00:37 We could just call switch, and then what do we want to be testing?
• 00:41 We want to test day, right?
• 00:44 So here, same thing like the if-else statement, we have these curly brackets.
• 00:48 And inside of here, we create cases.
• 00:51 So for the case of Monday,
• 00:54 let's Console.Write out something here.
• 00:59 And let's say, I've got a bad
• 01:04 case of the Mondays, right?
• 01:09 And then we type break.
• 01:11 So just like with an if statement, when it becomes true, it automatically ends.
• 01:16 With a switch, you have to be explicit.
• 01:18 You have to say, hey, end, and to do that we say break, right?
• 01:21 We say, don't continue on with the rest of the code.
• 01:25 So we've got a case for Monday, let's create a case for Tuesday.
• 01:31 And let me just copy this and say, I don't know,
• 01:37 Tuesday is better than Monday, right?
• 01:43 I don't know, and we could just keep coming through here for
• 01:46 all the cases that we want.
• 01:48 So Wednesday, how do you spell Wednesday?
• 01:51 Is that right, that looks right.
• 01:53 So let's say woohoo, Humpday,
• 01:56 I don't know, right, and break.
• 02:01 And you could just keep coming through here, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
• 02:04 Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and creating all the cases that you want.
• 02:08 And that's what switch is good for.
• 02:09 When you know the very specific number and
• 02:11 criteria of the cases you want to create, then you're going to want to use a switch.
• 02:17 Now, we can also do sort of a catch-all, we can create a default, right?
• 02:23 And so here we might say, thank goodness it's not Monday, right, I don't know.
• 02:31 So if we go ahead and save this and run it, what do we think's going to happen?
• 02:37 Well, we see, I've got a bad case of the Mondays, why?
• 02:40 Well, because our day is Monday.
• 02:42 And we start this thing out, and we say, hey,
• 02:44 use this day variable as sort of the criteria.
• 02:47 And if day is Monday, as is the case here, then do this and then stop, right?
• 02:55 If day is Tuesday, do this and then stop.
• 02:59 If it's Wednesday, do this and then stop.
• 03:01 So we can type in Tuesday as our day,
• 03:05 right, run this guy.
• 03:08 Sure enough, Tuesday is better than Monday, right, and on and on.
• 03:12 If we pick some other day that's not listed in our cases here, remember,
• 03:16 we've got this default.
• 03:18 So if none of these are met, if none of these cases exist,
• 03:23 then we just do the default.
• 03:25 So save this and run it, sure enough, thank goodness it's not Monday.
• 03:31 Because that's our default text when none of the days
• 03:36 are explicitly listed here, right?
• 03:39 So switch is very useful.
• 03:41 Right here, I've just got this hard-coded in as Friday.
• 03:44 In reality, you'd probably have some user interaction where you asked the user
• 03:48 a question, hey, what day is it?
• 03:50 They type in Monday, it spits out, I've got a bad case of the Mondays.
• 03:53 They type in Tuesday, it spits out, Tuesday's better than Monday.
• 03:58 Wednesday, woohoo, Humpday, and on and on.
• 04:00 But for sake of just explaining this, I've just hard-coded it in here, and
• 04:04 you could certainly do it like that.
• 04:06 So that's all for this video.
• 04:07 In the next video, we'll start to look at loops.

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