Iterator Vs Enumerator

[AJ sisodia]

I take it both serve the same purpose.
Enumeration interface has become obsolete but in case of HashTable enumerator would be preferred as HashTable does not directly support itertors.

i would like to know can i altogether leave enumerator and can depend on iterator to access elements one by one.
Why do we give preference to iterator over enumerator. What is the difference between the two if any.

[Christophe Verré]

http://www.coderanch.com/t/202139/Performance/java/Enumeration-vs-Iterator

[Jesper de Jong]

It's Hashtable (lower case t), not HashTable.

You should use HashMap instead of Hashtable, if possible. Hashtable is obsolete, just like interface Enumeration.

If you are stuck with Hashtable and you want to use an iterator, you can easily write an adapter class that adapts an Enumeration to an Iterator (note, this is untested code):

public class EnumIter<E> implements Iterator<E>
{
    private Enumeration<E> e;
 
    public EnumIter(Enumeration<E> e) {
        this.e = e;
    }
 
    public boolean hasNext() {
        return e.hasMoreElements();
    }
 
    public E next() {
        return e.nextElement();
    }
 
    public void remove() {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException("remove() is not supported");
    }
}