Good practice for method in java

Question

I have a method that read from database and get some string there. According what I get I will override that string for another that I already know. For example:

• str → string
• bin → binary
• and so on..

My question is, what is the best practice for doing this? Of course I already thought about if's...

if (str.equals("str"))
    str = "string";

A file that have this things pre-defined, a multi-dimensional array, etc.. But this all seems a quite newbie, so what do you recommend? What is the best way?

Answer 1

Use a Map:

// create a map that maps abbreviated strings to their replacement text
Map<String, String> abbreviationMap = new HashMap<String, String>();

// populate the map with some values
abbreviationMap.put("str", "string");
abbreviationMap.put("bin", "binary");
abbreviationMap.put("txt", "text");

// get a string from the database and replace it with the value from the map
String fromDB = // get string from database
String fullText = abbreviationMap.get(fromDB);

You can read more about Maps here.