Web Programming with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript

11.12 switch Statement

For the Pet Registry web page to be useful in the real world, you’d need to modify it to accommodate more than just two types of pets. The web page’s register function uses an if statement to distinguish between two types—Dog and Hedgehog. To accommodate more pet types, you could use an if statement with lots of else if clauses. But the more elegant solution is to use a switch statement.

The switch statement works similarly to the “if, else if” form of the if statement in that it allows you to follow one of several paths. But a key difference between the switch statement and the “if, else if” statement is that the switch statement’s determination of which path to take is based on a single value. (For an “if, else if” ...