I am learning looping statements Can you tell me how for-each works in Java

Question

Consider:

List<String> someList = new ArrayList<String>();
// add "monkey", "donkey", "skeleton key" to someList

for (String item : someList) {
    System.out.println(item);
}

What would the equivalent for loop look like without using the for each syntax?

Answer 1

While programming we often write code that looks like the following:

char[] grades = ....
for(int i = 0; i < grades.length; i++) {   // for i goes from 0 to grades.length
    System.out.print(grades[i]);           // Print grades[i]
}

The foreach syntax allows this common pattern to be written in a more natural and less syntactically noisy way.

for(char grade : grades) {   // foreach grade in grades
    System.out.print(grade); // print that grade
}

Additionally this syntax is valid for objects such as Lists or Sets which do not support array indexing, but which do implement the Java Iterable interface.