Declarations, Initialization, and Scoping - SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java Platform SE6 - page 149

Using enums in a switch Statement
A unique feature of enums is that when you switch on a variable of an enum type, you
do not prefi x the case statements with the enum type and the case statements must be
values from the enum. For example, the following switch statement does not compile if
now is of type Season :
switch(now) {
case 0 :
System.out.println(“It is cold now”);
break;
case 1 :
System.out.println(“It is hot now”);
break;
default:
System.out.println(“It is nice now”);
}
This code generates the following compiler error:
EnumTest.java:5: an enum switch case label must be the unqualified
name of an enumeration constant
case 0 :
^
Using enums
The compiler generates a special method named values when it generates the class for your
enum declaration. The values method returns an array of the enum values. For example,
suppose we have the following Direction enum:
1. public enum Direction {
2. NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST
3. }
The following for-each loop iterates through the array returned by the values method
and displays each value using the toString method of the enum:
10. for(Direction d : Direction.values()) {
11. System.out.print(d.toString() + “ “);
12. }