Is it possible to use .contains() in a switch statement?

Question

This is just a simple example of what I'm trying to do:

switch (window.location.href.contains('')) {
    case "google":
        searchWithGoogle();
        break;
    case "yahoo":
        searchWithYahoo();
        break;
    default:
        console.log("no search engine found");
}

If it's not possible/feasible what would be a better alternative?

Solution:

After reading some of the responses I found the following to be a simple solution.

function winLocation(term) {
    return window.location.href.contains(term);
}
switch (true) {
    case winLocation("google"):
        searchWithGoogle();
        break;
    case winLocation("yahoo"):
        searchWithYahoo();
        break;
    default:
        console.log("no search engine found");
}

Answer 1

"Yes", but it won't do what you expect.

The expression used for the switch is evaluated once - in this case contains evaluates to true/false as the result (e.g. switch(true) or switch(false)) , not a string that can be matched in a case.

As such, the above approach won't work. Unless this pattern is much larger/extensible, just use simple if/else-if statements.

var loc = ..
if (loc.contains("google")) {
  ..
} else if (loc.contains("yahoo")) {
  ..
} else {
  ..
}

However, consider if there was a classify function that returned "google" or "yahoo", etc, perhaps using conditionals as above. Then it could be used as so, but is likely overkill in this case.

switch (classify(loc)) {
   case "google": ..
   case "yahoo": ..
   ..
}

---

While the above discusses such in JavaScript, Ruby and Scala (and likely others) provide mechanisms to handle some more "advanced switch" usage.