Re: Random Enum

From:
Lew <noone@lewscanon.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.help
Date:
Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:12:27 -0400
Message-ID:
<h6va9d$vfk$1@news.albasani.net>
markspace wrote:

Lew wrote:

public class RandomEnum // untested, not even compiled yet
{
  private static final Random rand = new Random();

  public static <E extends Enum<E>> E random( Class <E> clazz )
  {
    E [] values = clazz.getEnumConstants();
    return values [rand.nextInt( values.length )];
  }
}


This is what I would have suggested. It's pretty simple really. You
could define a similar method that takes an enum rather than a class and
returns a random value, it's just as easy to call getDeclaringClass() on
an enum and use this one method.

package randomenum;

import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.util.Random;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

public class RandomEnum
{

    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        System.out.println( "Random TimeUnit: " +
                randomEnum( TimeUnit.SECONDS ) );
        System.out.println( "Random ElementType: " +
                randomEnum( ElementType.FIELD ) );
    }

    static Enum<?> randomEnum( Enum<?> e )

// or you could overload random( Enum<?> e )

    {
        return random( e.getDeclaringClass() );
    }


And couldn't you make this generic, too? (I haven't tried it yet.)

   public static <E extends Enum<E>> E random( Enum <E> e )
   {
     return random( e.getDeclaringClass() );
   }

    private static final Random rand = new Random();

    public static <E extends Enum <E>> E random( Class <E> clazz )
    {
        E [] values = clazz.getEnumConstants();
        return values [rand.nextInt( values.length )];
    }

}

OUTPUT:
run:
Random TimeUnit: MICROSECONDS
Random ElementType: LOCAL_VARIABLE
BUILD SUCCESSFUL (total time: 2 seconds)


--
Lew

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