How to describe a state with three items

Question

I am creating the board game Tic Tac Toe in Java.

A cell will have three states: empty, X or O.

What is the best practice for representing this in Java? Should I create its own Cell class or just use integers (0/1/2) to represent the three states? If it had two states then I could use for example boolean to represent the two states, is there a similar already defined class for something with three states?

Answer 1

I would use an enum for this:

enum CellState {
    EMPTY,
    X,
    O
}

And then in your code:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    CellState[][] cellStates = new CellState[3][3];
    cellStates[0][0] = CellState.X;

    // Do other stuff

}

I just defined the board structure as CellState[][] as example but this can be whatever.