snipped switch statement

One of many ways....

First off, create a Map of the strings and their corresponding Color
OBJECTs (in case you don't know, when you do 'Color.blue' what is
actually happening is a Color object is returned and that object
represents the blue colour)

Map colorsToUse = new HashMap();
colorsToUse.put("blue", Color.blue);
colorsToUse.put("red", Color.red);
colorsToUse.put("green", Color.green);

Then in the method that is handling the PARAM line, we simply need to
see if the PARAM String value is found in the map, if so, use it, if not
default to blue.....

public void someMethodHandlingHTMLfile(String colorParamFromHTML) {

   Color actualColor = Color.blue; // defaulting to blue

   if (colorsToUse.containsKey(colorParamFromHTML)
      actualColor = (Color)colorsToUse.get(colorParamFromHtml);

   this.setForeground(actualColor);
 }

The beauty here, is that when you need to handle additional colors, you
only have to add them to the map and the rest of the code won't need to
change.

switch supports primitive none floating point types only
direct translation is hardly more verbose:

    if("blue".equals(myColor)) this.setForeground(Color.blue);
else if("red".equals(myColor))  this.setForeground(Color.red);

else                            this.setForeground(Color.blue);

But better is:

You want to Map a String to a Color constant
So use a Map with those mappings

Map<String, Integer> colorMap = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
colorMap.put("red", Color.red);
colorMap.put("blue", Color.blue);

if (colorMap.contains(myColor)) {
   setForeground(colorMap.get(myColor));
}

--
Mike W

you do it with enums.  See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/enum.html

You convert your switch  string to an enum with valueOf and use enum
constants instead of strings on your case labels.

The code can look like this wit enums with methods.


 setBackground( colourScheme.getColor() );

<SNIP Code>
Thanks for your help everyone...Got it working.