java - Getting all names in an enum as a String[]

Question

What's the easiest and/or shortest way possible to get the names of enum elements as an array of Strings?

What I mean by this is that if, for example, I had the following enum:

public enum State {
    NEW,
    RUNNABLE,
    BLOCKED,
    WAITING,
    TIMED_WAITING,
    TERMINATED;

    public static String[] names() {
        // ...
    }
}

the names() method would return the array { "NEW", "RUNNABLE", "BLOCKED", "WAITING", "TIMED_WAITING", "TERMINATED" }.

Answer 1

Here's one-liner for any enum class:

public static String[] getNames(Class<? extends Enum<?>> e) {
    return Arrays.stream(e.getEnumConstants()).map(Enum::name).toArray(String[]::new);
}

Pre Java 8 is still a one-liner, albeit less elegant:

public static String[] getNames(Class<? extends Enum<?>> e) {
    return Arrays.toString(e.getEnumConstants()).replaceAll("^.|.$", "").split(", ");
}

That you would call like this:

String[] names = getNames(State.class); // any other enum class will work

If you just want something simple for a hard-coded enum class:

public static String[] names() {
    return Arrays.toString(State.values()).replaceAll("^.|.$", "").split(", ");
}