How to check if an input character is a vowel

In this blog post, I will be demonstrating how you can check if an input character is a vowel. I will be using Enum for this. If you’d like to study enums in detail, you can refer to this blog post.

Consider the following code snippet:

public enum Vowels {
a,e,i,o,u;
}

public class CheckIfVowel {

public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Enter a character:");
Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
String input = scanner.nextLine();
boolean found = false;
for(Vowels vowel:Vowels.values()){

if (vowel.name().equalsIgnoreCase(input)){
found = true;
break;
}

}
if(!found)
  System.out.println("Input "+input +" is NOT a vowel");
else
  System.out.println("Input "+input +" is a vowel");
scanner.close();
}

}

Code explanation

First, the code declares an Enum called Vowels. It is assigned the vowels i.e. a,e,i,o,u.  We are using the CheckIfVowel class to check if the input character is a vowel. The input character is read using the Scanner class. A for loop iterates through the Vowels enum values. It compares each enum value with the input character to check if there is a match. A case-insensitive comparison is done.   If there is a match, it sets the boolean flag found to true and breaks from the for loop. Depending on the value of the boolean flag found, the Sysout statement prints whether the value is found or not.

Code output

So if you run this code with the input value as a, the following will be printed:

Enter a character:
a
Input a is a vowel

Also, if you run this code with the input value as Z,  the following will be printed:

Enter a character:
Z
Input Z is NOT a vowel

You can also modify this code and add additional checks if check if the input character is an alphabet or digit, etc.