tostring - How To Print String representation of Color in Java

Question

I have an array of colours of size n. In my program, the number of teams is always <= n, and I need to assign each team a unique color. This is my color array:

private static Color[] TEAM_COLORS = {Color.BLUE, Color.RED, Color.CYAN, Color.GREEN, Color.ORANGE, Color.PINK};

When I print information about the players in the console, I want to print what color is associated with them. When I print the color, I get

java.awt.Color[r=...,g=...,b=...]. 

I understand that this is how Java prints colours. I was wondering if there was a way to instead print BLUE, RED, etc. (so the pre-defined color string).

Answer 1

One option would be to create a NamedColor enum:

public enum NamedColor {
    BLUE(Color.BLUE),
    RED(Color.RED),
    ...;

    private final Color awtColor;

    private NamedColor(Color awtColor) {
        this.awtColor = awtColor;
    }

    public Color getAwtColor() {
        return awtColor;
    }
}

You'd then make your TEAM_COLORS array an array of NamedColor values instead of Color values, and fetch the AWT color when you need it. The default toString implementation of an enum is its name.

Another alternative would be to create your own Map<Color, String> and consult that when you need the string representation for a color.