Iterating over Enum Cases

Say you've created a nice new enum with several cases:

enum Drink: String {

   case coke, beer, water, soda, lemonade, wine, vodka, gin

}

Now, you'd like to display all of those drinks at runtime in a list. You somehow want to run a for-each loop over all of your enum cases. The enum type does not offer this ability out-of-the-box. Instead, you have to explicitly tell the Swift compiler that you wish for your enum to be iterable. You do this by conforming to the empty CaseIterable protocol:

enum Drink: String, CaseIterable {

   case coke, beer, water, soda, lemonade, wine, vodka, gin

}

Now, you can easily iterate over your enum with the new allCases property:

for drink in Drink.allCases {

   print(\"For lunch I like to drink \(drink)\)\")

}

This works only if your enum cases do not contain any associated values:

enum Drink: CaseIterable {

   case beer 

   case cocktail(ingredients: [String])

}

This code will not compile and the reason for that is simple. The Swift compiler does not know how to construct the cocktail case. And for good reason, should it be a Gin Tonic, or a Cuba libre? You wouldn't want the Swift compiler to decide that, but it has to! Because in order for you use allCases it will need to return an enum case including associated values.

So there it is, CaseIterable is a great Swift feature, however keep in mind that it can only be used with simple enum cases.