EnumSet : Java Glossary

2007-07-29 by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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EnumSet

EnumSet lets you handle combinations of enum constants. If you are a mathematician, you might look on EnumSet as a way of doing efficient set operations such as union, intersection, difference, and complement. Internally the calculations are done with bits, packed into longs, much like BitSet. This representation is compact and efficient. If you study the documentation for EnumSet you will not see much. EnumSet inherits all its useful methods from AbstractCollection via AbstractSet.

If you are a programmer, you might look on EnumSet as a high level way of manipulating bit flags and bit masks.

Using An EnumSet

An EnumSet must be composed of elements all from the same enum.

Two other techniques for dealing with sets include HashSet and BitSet. You can also do low level bit masking using byte, int or long.

Learning More

Sun’s Javadoc on the EnumSet class : available:

on the web at java.sun.com
in the current JDK 1.6.0_07 or in the old JDK 1.5.0_16 or in the beta JDK 1.6.0_10 on your local J: drive.

Sun’s Javadoc on the AbstractCollection class : available:

on the web at java.sun.com
in the current JDK 1.6.0_07 or in the old JDK 1.5.0_16 or in the beta JDK 1.6.0_10 on your local J: drive.

binary: BitSet
enum
HashSet

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